NEW YORK-By July, Atlantic Tele-Network Inc. plans to launch service under the Cellular One brand in Bermuda, a tax-haven country with the third-highest per-capita income in the world and average monthly cellular phone bills of $89.
The holding company, based in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, is a 30-percent owner of the only cellular and personal communications competitor to the Bermuda Telephone Co. Bermudan partners own the remaining stake, but Atlantic has an option to acquire up to 47 percent of the new wireless provider.
In addition, Trinidad recently opened its mobile cellular market to competition, and a second license award is expected this summer.
“We are competing with a local partner for that,” said Cornelius Prior, chief executive, adding that Trinidad is restricting foreign ownership of the second cellular license to 49 percent.
Mobile telephony is just one of the many expansion opportunities Atlantic Tele-Network sees in the Caribbean Basin, Prior said at the recent New York Society of Security Analysts “Telecommunications Conference.”
“Cable & Wireless is the entrenched wireline provider in the English-speaking countries. In recent weeks, there was a ministerial meeting of six countries, including Aruba and St. Lucia, and all said they will bring competition to their countries,” he said.
New fixed wireless technology would cost about a third of the amount needed to install new landline networks, “but we can’t do that legally today.”
In Haiti, a French-speaking Caribbean country, Atlantic Tele-Network “discovered a substantial middle class hanging on and hoping that, with U.S. help, the country will turn around,” Prior said.
Atlantic is a 75-percent owner of Digicom S.A., which offers dispatch radio, paging and wireless data services in Haiti. Digicom’s paging business operates on a break-even basis, he said.
“We want to compete with the local phone company through wireless means using our paging company. (Toward that end), we have entered into discussions with a large American company with a cellular license [in Haiti].”
In English-speaking Guyana, Atlantic Tele-Network is the incumbent and exclusive local, long-distance and international wireline carrier. In 1991, the federal government granted it an 80-percent ownership stake in Guyana Telephone and Telegraph Co. Ltd. for 20 years with an automatic 20-year renewal. The federal government owns the other 20 percent, a fact that presents problems and benefits, Prior said.
“Sometimes the Public Utilities Commission forgets we’re on the government side vis-a-vis rate increases, and we have to resort to the government.”
GT&T also provides cellular service to 2,000 of Guyana’s 750,000 residents. There is a new cellular competitor, which has about 50 customers so far, Prior said.
“Competition on the cellular side of our business helps us because it shows we’re not completely backward in terms of competition,” he added.
