A proposed surcharge as high as US$0.03 per minute on all calls to Jamaica seems set to land squarely on Cayman’s thousands of Jamaicans starting 1 June.
The Kingston government announced last week it was invoking a clause in the Telecommunications Act of 2000, allowing it to impose a surcharge on all telephone calls to the island nation of 3 million.
All calls that terminate in Jamaica on a land line will cost an extra US$0.03 per minute. All calls terminating on a mobile line will attract an additional; US$0.02 per minute.
Claiming the measure will raise almost J$1 billion (US$16.35 million), Minister of Commerce, Science and Technology Phillip Paulwell said 18 May that the universal service charge would fund education initiatives, specifically an e-learning project announced by Prime Minister P.J. Patterson in April.
Most calls to Jamaica originate with the enormous expatriate communities of North America and the UK. Almost 3 million Jamaicans live overseas.
Despite Mr Paulwell’s claim that the new charges would be borne by telephone companies and not consumers, Cayman’s Jamaican Honorary Consul in Cayman, Robert Hamaty, had serious doubts.
‘This is a very unusual thing, and I don’t see how they [Kingston] are going to stop it,’ he said, asking how government could prevent Cayman’s service providers from raising their rates.
More than 6,500 Jamaicans live in Cayman, but Mr. Hamaty said that as much as 20 per cent of Cayman’s population has ties to the island state through marriage or across generations.
‘In fact the majority of the population of West Bay has connections to St. Elizabeth’s in Jamaica, a traditional jumping-off point for people coming here,’ he said.
Local telephone companies declined to say how many calls or how many international minutes they routed to Jamaica each month, but the number is substantial.
They also declined to say if they planned to raise call rates to Jamaica, although nothing prevents such a move and it appears unlikely they will absorb the new costs.
‘When this is closer to being a completed deal, or looks like it’s close, then we will have some more information,’ said Cable & Wireless spokeswoman Andrea Fa’amoe.
The average cost of a cellular calls to Jamaica is CI$0.24 per minute, and about CI$0.90 per minute on a landline.
The new surcharges will be collected by Jamaica’s telephone companies, Cable & Wireless, Digicel and MiPhone, which will bill the overseas telephone companies that route the calls into Jamaica.
Errol Miller, vice president for Corporate Communications at Cable & Wireless in Kingston, said the government had approached the operators to collect the fees on behalf of Mr. Paulwell’s ministry.
‘The charge is not on our services. It’s paid by the people who are terminating calls in Jamaica. Whatever traffic comes in, we provide the network, we provide the figures, and Kingston deals with the operators.’
Cayman’s Information and Communication Technology Authority said international call charges were established among telephone companies and subject to frequent changes. The ICTA had limited authority to affect them.
‘We only regulate the rates of Cable & Wireless because they are the incumbent,’ said Greg van Koughnett, ICTA general counsel and head of licensing.
‘They [telephone companies] will not have to clear [this] with the ICTA because international settlement rates change all the time,’ he said.
He cautioned that consumer prices do not automatically reflect every change in settlement rates because it can be annoying and people want certainty and stability.
‘You have to consider what you are doing to people, and making it more difficult to have contact across a country is often an undesirable outcome,’ he said.
Still, government regulators are helpless to intervene, and Mr. Hamaty said Jamaicans may not realise immediately what has happened.
‘It’s impossible to know how many calls go to Jamaica but it’s huge; it’s very big. It’s how everyone keeps in touch with their families.
‘This is a sort of indirect taxation and [Kingston] has done a very good job of hiding this, of selling it, and sometimes, when you hide it, people do not see it until much later,’ Mr. Hamaty said.
He did not expect a public outcry, and said Jamaicans were likely to continue calling — and paying more.
‘The worst thing you can do is hand a telephone to a Jamaican. They never come off it.’
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