The lobby group - the Jamaica Competitive
Telecommunications Association (JCTA), said the members would in fact commit substantial capital to the sector once the revenue and profit from their operations allowed them to do so.

"Any investor wants to see cash-flow and an operating business before investing more in infrastructure," said Steve Twomey, president of Reliant Enterprise Ltd and spokesperson of the 10-member JCTA board. Twomey was speaking at the formal launch of the JCTA's on Tuesday at the Pegasus Hotel in Kingston.

Twomey was responding to a comment made in January by J Paul Morgan, the director general of the OUR (Office of Utilities Regulation) in which he expressed "disappointment" over the state of the industry almost a year since full liberalisation.

Morgan who was speaking at the OUR's quarterly media brief, said back then that "the real contributor to the development of our telecoms sector are those who are prepared to make the investments in facilities and not the margin gatherers who are really just buying and selling minutes which were handled by someone else (C&WJ)".

The comment was aimed at members of the JCTA -telecoms outfits that act as middlemen between US carriers and local land-line or cellphone networks such as Digicel and Cable & Wireless Jamaica.

These intermediaries do not have local phone networks of their own. They set up satellites which allow them to enter into deals with US carriers, to transfer US calls to a final Jamaican destination. They secure business by offering the US carriers the lowest rates to transfer calls to Jamaica. They in turn pay C&WJ or Digicel to terminate the calls to their network. The difference between what they get from the US carriers and what they pay to C&WJ, Digicel or any other local network operator represents their margin.

On Wednesday Twomey said that members of the industry had in fact already spent millions on their operations, and that the industry here was no different from what emerged in the USA and the advent of deregulation in that market.

"J Paul Morgan-OUR's director general-questions the investment by the industry...we have invested millions of United States dollars and created many jobs in the last two years," he said.

He promised that the investors would create value-added in the market, once the business began to see returns.

At Tuesday's launch, the association vowed to take legal action against the OUR for failing, the members charged, to properly regulate aspects of the rates charged by C&WJ.

The group claimed that C&WJ was allowed by the utilities regulator to "double" the rates it charged other telecoms providers to transfer calls to its land lines, thereby reducing the providers' margins.

The OUR will face an independent tribunal to answer the charges next month.

http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/magazines/Business/html/20040325T200000-0500_57686_OBS_TELECOMS_LOBBY_GROUP_CHIDES_OUR.asp