In an effort to deepen its penetration in the mobile phone market, Cable and Wireless Jamaica (CWJ) on Wednesday launched two new calling plans and a three-month handset sale that it says will offer mobile customers significant savings.

"We will be increasing our value propositions in the marketplace significantly as we launch another momentous phase in our mobile operations by rolling out two new big calling plans and a Big Sale extravaganza that is bound to stir up the market," said CWJ CEO Rodney Davis, at a launch for the three products held at the CWJ headquarters in Kingston.  "Cable and Wireless remains committed to leading the market in every area of telecommunications that we compete in.we intend to achieve this by giving customers the best product, the best service, and quite frankly the best value."

For a weekly payment of J$200, one of the new calling plans - "Anyone Freetime" - offers prepaid customers two hours free talk time, 20 free text messages and 20 per cent off international calls daily.  Also on this plan, a monthly subscription of $800 will see CWJ post paid customers receiving a 20 per cent discount off all calls to the US, Canada and the United Kingdom (fixed lines only) plus 3,600 off-peak minutes and 600 text messages to inter-network numbers.

The other new calling plan, known as the "Anyone World", is available to just prepaid subscribers and allows customers up to 2,500 minutes of calling time to the US, Canada and the United Kingdom for a monthly fee of $999.  Finally, the company's "Big Sale," which will be available from May 7 until the end of July, will offer discounts of as much as 50 per cent on a variety of CWJ handsets.

Indeed, Wednesday's launch by CWJ is another aggressive customer savings initiative by the telecommunications firm in its bid to increasingly procure a market that has had its fair share of 'price wars' among the major competitors.  Davis said that the latest move is a mere continuation of the market-leading initiative it started when it launched its "Anyone Plan" a year and a half ago.

"Eighteen months ago when we had the big launch for our 'Anyone Plan', at that time we thought that it was the clearest, cleanest and most simple plan in the marketplace which simply offered the best value to consumers when seeking out a mobile plan," said Davis.  "We said our objective was to break the barrier of communications in Jamaica by making it more affordable to Jamaicans to communicate using whatever method they chose.  "We also indicated that Anyone will serve as a platform on which we would continue to offer unprecedented offerings to our mobile customers using Anyone as a launch pad," added the CEO.

Upon its launch, the "Anyone Plan" was effectively a massive cut in what CWJ charged its mobile phone customers for calls into its competitors' networks.  Against the backdrop that prior to the "Anyone Plan", it had cost CWJ customers $17 a minute for calls into other mobile networks, the 'Anyone Plan' gave customers a flat $10 per minute rate for inter and intra network calls between its peak hours of 7:00 am and 7:00 pm, a reduction of 41 per cent.  For off-peak periods, the rate was $8 a minute, a reduction of approximately 54 per cent.

According to Davis, these prices were up to 45 per cent cheaper than the cheapest rates offered by CWJ's main competitor, Digicel, for calls that terminate in other people's mobile networks.  This is a competitive advantage over the Irish firm which he says they still obtain and with the addition of the "Anyone Freetime" incentives (Depicted in table 1), the CWJ boss is proclaiming that the firm has the best mobile phone plan on the island.

"The Anyone plan was the first plan in Jamaica that offered a single rate to call across any network at anytime - the only rate that gives cross net calling at the same rate as calling on networks, in other words, reduces the need to have two phones," said Davis.  "It's as much as a 45 per cent reduction in price to any of our competitors for calling across networks.

"The truth is that, with 'Anyone' and the innovations associated with that and the promotions that we have done over the last 18 months, we have become the clear market leader when it comes to offering value for money...the numbers don't lie," added Davis.

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