The Tribune

By SIMON

When Cable Bahamas recently and abruptly suspended PBS from its lineup it was the last straw for many already angry customers sickened by the continuous and seemingly irreversible decline of the company’s quality of programs and poor service culture.

As usual, there was no explanation or transparency regarding the suspension. Still, there are suspicions about the financial reasons behind why the cable provider has dropped a number of channels over the years.

PBS is a quality channel with exceptional public broadcast and other programs such as British productions including Masterpiece Theatre. It was an oasis away from much of the low-quality reality television and other crappy fare on local cable. There is no telling if or when it may return.

“No matter”, said a friend and others, who finally decided to junk the company and purchase a Fire TV Stick. An associate chimed in: “Cable Bahamas is so bad, they also forced me to get the Stick”, which she went online to purchase the next day.

There have been problems with the PBS feed before. The sound on the channel, like other channels, was reliably and regularly off.

The Bahamas is stuck in a telecommunications quagmire cum quicksand caught between a duopoly with monopolistic practices.

The current dismal and pathetic service from BTC and Cable Bahamas for telephone, internet, and cable TV service, is arguably some of the worst consumers have experienced over the decades. A reckoning is on the horizon.

Everyone has a story. A sampling. A customer was called and told a cable TV technician would be at his residence in two hours. The technician never called or showed up.

Another customer was assured twice that a technician would come to see why the HBO package he is paying for is not on his television. Again, a technician never arrived. HBO is still off for him. It has been more than six weeks since he first complained.

Cable Bahamas is happy to fine a fee for late bill payment. Perhaps they should fine themselves a late fee and reimburse customers for not showing up on time or at all and for not for not bringing back on in a timely manner missing channels.

A dear friend recounts her nightmares dealing with Cable Bahamas. Three times she waited on the phone over the course of an hour to get the company to send a signal so she could get online.

Each of these times the phone hung up as her call was being answered. As in other jurisdictions, is it the case that there is a strategy in place at so-called customer service to disconnect after a period of time to fend off complaints?

The weariness of a customer in the US desperately attempting to resolve a service problem sounds typical of what Bahamians experience daily with BTC and Cable Bahamas.

“My calls began getting lost, or transferred laterally to someone who needed the story of a previous repair all over again. In time, I could predict the emotional contours of every conversation: the burst of scripted empathy, the endless routing, the promise of finally reaching a manager who—CLICK.” 

Accompanying the abysmal service are the annoying and empty marketing campaigns by the companies lauding their quality customer service and technology. A better marketing strategy might be: “We are really very bad but we’re trying to improve”, which may have a minimum ring of credibility.

An aside, someone recently suggested a new theme song for BPL: “Mammy no light, no light”.

When a technician tells a customer that their complaint will be escalated it is code for good luck. First, the poorly trained customer service representative is clueless as to how to fix the problem even after sending multiple hits to a box which may or may not work.

Secondly, it means you are royally screwed and your problem will not be fixed or responded to anytime soon. Escalation is a synonym for buzz off, a euphemism for another four-letter word preceding off.

God help you if you do not know how to locate and take a picture of the number from the back of your cable box, a number that is so small that even those with good eyesight have trouble reading.

With internet service down, again, and again, some consumers have had to use their cell phones as hotspots to get online, resulting in higher bills. A customer with BTC complained bitterly that because his internet was off, he had to use his ALIV cell phone as a hot spot service to get online for a meeting.

This same customer recalls calling BTC to find the store nearest him. The customer service representative said she had no idea as she was resident in Freeport. Many of the company’s representatives are indifferent to queries and complaints.

BTC residential lines are constantly off because of the unresolved problems with the company’s infrastructure. Home and cell calls are constantly dropping.

Bad reception with WhatsApp calls in the country are likely caused by “unreliable or slow internet connections, which require more bandwidth for voice and video calls...”

A technician from BTC told this columnist to drop the company’s residential service and try ALIV because the company he worked with for two decades was not going to put fibre optic lines in certain neighbourhoods anytime soon.

The old BATELCO monopolistic practices are legend. For decades they gouged customers in the long-distance telephone market, charging exorbitant prices, including for 1-800-calls to the US

A number of businesspeople regularly travelled to Florida to make calls within the US The cost of an airline ticket, accommodations, car rental, food, and other expenses often proved cheaper than using BATELCO.

With new technologies this market eventually collapsed. Is the domestic cell phone market also going to collapse under new technologies?

The legacy carriers of BTC and Cable Bahamas have complained to the Utilities Regulation and Competition Authority (URCA) that they cannot compete with the likes of Starlink, owned by parent company SpaceX. They are correct.

Scores of Bahamians have now shifted to the internet provider, including those at odds with the politics of the company’s major shareholder, Elon Musk. In a number of Family Islands, Starlink is a necessity given the awful internet service in many communities.

Other companies, including Amazon’s Project Kuiper, OneWeb, and the Chinese government-backed SpaceSail, will offer Starlink more competition in time.

Starlink is offering cell phone service in the US When this satellite-based technology becomes ubiquitous and affordable, many Bahamians will get rid of their landlines and utilize overseas companies for cell service.

Bahamians do not mind paying a fair price for a domestic service that works consistently. Instead, we have in many ways been abused through a history of monopolistic practices, arrogance, gouging, limited options, and poor customer service. We have been stuck with deplorable service providers.

But a fed-up populace, with new technologies at hand and more on the horizon, is going to have a reckoning with Cable Bahamas and BTC.

In the not-too-distant future, many if not most Bahamians will utilize a foreign internet and cell phone service provider, and international streaming and other services for what was once provided by local companies.

This means they will no longer rely on local companies for any telecommunications services. The only question is when the reckoning, which has begun, will reach its fullest intensity.