CONSUMERS ARE “cutting the cord” but Cable & Wireless is determined not to let its fixed voice business die.
C&W Caribbean president Garry Sinclair said the worldwide trend, where more consumers were ditching the traditional landline telephone for technological mobility, was a feature of the Barbadian market the company could not ignore.
The Jamaican said “fixed voice [service] is in a structural decline, in other words, it’s a lifestyle issue”.
“People, more and more, and particularly younger people, but just generally consumers, are what we call cutting the cord. Nobody wants to be tethered to a wall or a cord anymore, mobility is where the future is heading. People want to get their entertainment, their communication, [and] get work done on the go. And so, less and less people are utilising the fixed voice portion of our business,” he explained.
“Are we going to let it die? No. Businesses still rely on fixed voice quite a bit, clearly, and there we have a number of solutions, both over the fixed voiced network but increasingly voice over IP based solutions that businesses are going to be able to avail themselves of.
“And on the consumer side, what we are doing is offering triple play, . . . that enables customers to get all of these services as part of a single package and that is the way obviously to continue to drive the uptake of the fixed voice business.”
Sinclair said the idea was not to let fixed voiced services “die”, but to “increasingly find ways of bundling and packaging it with the more popular tools in order to ensure that people get the utility out of it, because it is still the safest and most reliable means of communications through natural disasters even, and all kinds of disruptions.
“So it is not to my mind completely an obsolete technology but it is certainly from a lifestyle standpoint a technology that most consumers are gravitating away from more and more. This is a universal trend, people cut the cord everywhere, even in the more developed markets,” he observed.
Meanwhile, Sinclair said economies in large Caribbean markets including Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica were “struggling” but said C&W intended to “commit to assisting in any way in helping these economies to improve”.
“ . . . These markets are struggling and so that has an impact on the average revenue per user that we can get out of these markets, and we need those average revenues per user to increase in order to justify the very expensive investments you have to keep making in the infrastructure and improving the infrastructure in these markets,” he said.
“Economies, hopefully, will improve enabling higher spending power by our consumers so that we generate the [revenues] that justify the investments that we have to make and that we are committed to making in these markets.” (SC)
