Most consumers in Barbados may never have known until last Tuesday, when it launched its first prepaid international phone card, that the country had a fourth telecommunications company, Blue Communications Ltd.

The launch event took place at George Washington House, Bush Hill, with Prime Minister David Thompson making the ceremonial first call - to his mother-in-law in St. Lucia. (Obviously not forewarned, she asked halfway through, “What are you calling about?”).

Branded as Blue Connect, the card works in Barbados only with Cable & Wireless landlines and is available in $10 and $20 versions. Calls to the UK, USA, Canada cost 59 cents per minute, compared to $1.00 for C&W’s calling card and $1.30 for its residential phones.

Apart from local residential consumers looking to save money on overseas calls, Blue is hoping to make inroads into the tourism market. According to research by the company, which was presented at the launch by the company’s VP for Operations Greg Merrick, a 10-minute call to the UK, Canada or the USA from a hotel room in Barbados costs an average of Bds$43.50; if the visitor uses his or her cell phone to call those countries while here, the mobile roaming costs average $55 for the same 10 minutes; and if they use their credit card to call USA Direct, and AT&T service, the cost averages $107. By comparison Blue Connect card for $5.90 would do the trick. Mr. Merrick said the quoted costs were based on the average of 10 hotel properties and 10 mobile providers selected by the company in May 2008.

Paying retail
Mr. Merrick also touched on a wider issue being faced by his company in launching the service, that of the price it has to pay Cable & Wireless for accessing its local network, from which all of Blue Connect’s customers will be derived (except for when locals travel, because they can use a Blue Connect card to call home via their cell phones). As Mr. Merrick put it, although Blue Communications is, like Cable & Wireless, Digicel and TeleBarbados, the holder of an international public telecommunications network carrier license, which was issued by the Barbados government in June 2006, “unlike other license holders, Blue does not currently operate a domestic network. Therefore, our customers rely entirely on access facilities provided by other carriers to reach our international gateway.”

All well and good, but here’s the beef: the use of an international calling card by Blue, noted the VP, comes under the Fair Trading Commission’s Two Stage Dialing rules. Therefore, claims Mr. Merrick, “Access must be cost based, in accordance with FTC policy.” But although this facility was requested of C&W by Blue as long ago as 2006, and, he says, the policy on 2SD was approved by the former Cabinet last November, “C&W still refuses to provide cost based facilities.”
In the interim, therefore, Blue has negotiated a much higher rate, essentially paying retail as opposed to wholesale, with C&W for a parallel service with the weighty title of Service Provider Voice Dialup Access Lines, which is “non cost based - C&W earns a fee for each minute,” says Mr. Merrick.
The vice president said Blue Communications decided to bite the bullet and go ahead with its international calling card because it wanted to establish its name on the local market. Said Mr. Merrick, “After two years delay, Blue is able to offer the public substantial savings on international calls.”

Key personnel
Other key players in Blue Communications are Elliot Sachar, president, a chartered accountant and past president, Barbados International Business Association, as well as a current director of the Barbados Private Sector Association; Stan Gilkinson, VP international carrier sales, a former senior VP for marketing and sales with C&W Jamaica; and Leonardo Kunar, chief technology officer, one of the founders of Sunbeach Communications, in 1995, and who in his career also helped set up the first wireless wide area network in Barbados.

Mr. Merrick himself was a former managing director with Mitel Networks Int’l Ltd., a former project manager for Bell Canada, and has been a consultant in managed network services since 2001.
(For the more technically-minded among our readers, here are some of the company’s clams in terms of its IT platform: it says it has state-of-the-art switching equipment, including Entice, Emergent, and Stratus technology; its fibre interconnection features an 84 T1 capacity joining service with C&W, which gives it the capacity for expansion to over 2,000 simultaneous calls; its international fibre circuits have multiple T1 capacity with automatic IP failover using BGP, and it is a Category 5 facility with two weeks’ auxiliary power generation capacity.)•