Jersey Telecom price increases should be capped according to a new independent report.
And the price of the company’s mobile service is too high, says the report from telecommunications consultants Coleago.They suggest that in future prices should not be allowed to increase by more than two per cent below the Jersey inflation rate and that commercial competition in the mobile phone sector should be encouraged.The report says: ‘A simple benchmarking of average revenue per minute for Jersey against the UK and other European countries shows that overall Jersey customers are paying significantly more per minute than customers of other operators.’The consultants also conclude that Telecom has been making ‘excessive’ profits, with prices significantly above costs.Bob Lawrence, managing director of Jersey Telecom, said today: ‘We have been operating under a price freeze for the past year, so on the one hand we are pleased that the process is now complete and we can move forward and know the parametres we will be operating under.’But to say that our prices have been increasing is far from the truth - they have been falling, year on year.
We do not agree with these comments (that Jersey customers pay significantly more).
If you look back over the last five or ten years we have been consistently cutting prices.’The consultation document is available on the website www.jcra.je and the deadline for comments is 7 April.
Article posted on 19th March, 2004 - 12.00am
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