Distributors to lose thousands of dollars with switch to new Digicell four-G platform

Dionne Miranda

On Monday, B.T.L. introduced a new element to its Digicell service, particularly its 4G platform in which it is no longer adding onto its system cellular phones that aren’t directly compatible with its existing settings. Simply put, if you’re planning on purchasing or unlocking a phone made specifically for international GSM carriers such as AT&T and Verizon Wireless and cannot access its settings then chances are that you won’t be able to get on the network. B.T.L. says that the upgrade has been in the pipeline prior to the launch of the new network, but local distributors are not happy, contending that they have been given an unfair shake since they are now left with thousands of dollars worth of dead stock in their showcases. B.T.L.’s General Manager for Customer Service, Dr. Dionne Miranda, explains.

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Dr. Dionne Miranda, General Manager of Customer Service, B.T.L.

“We applied a feature to our system effective yesterday at ten a.m. which says that a phone which is proprietary to another network and does not allow us access to their engineering settings inside the phone when you go to the network settings portion that we will no longer be forcing those phones unto our network.  And the reason why he had to do that Isani is because our customers were complaining that they were getting dropped calls and their data was being very latent and slow and we found out that these types of telephones actually take up a lot more resources than the other phones but we were trying to facilitate the customers who were buying their phones anybody, getting it from abroad, from whomever and B.T.L. is not a phone provider, we’re a service provider.  So we’re not saying that you can’t buy the phone anywhere, we’re just saying that whenever you buy, buyer beware.  Be assured that it will work and in fact a new thing that we will be doing now is that we will start registering SIMs at our agents locations which means that you walk out of that store and you should check that your phone is working completely before you do.  Now the controversy that exists, I mean realistically there is nothing with the customers, we’ve had thirty-two customers over the past two days with issues which we’ve fixed because none of our existing customers will be affected.  Everybody who is an existing Digicell customer remains exactly the same way they were, their services and products are working great; however, if they are having an issue then we just need to check that for them because we did this to safeguard our current customer base.  We have actually updated the distributors over a year ago when we launched the 4G service that there were certain specifications to driving that network the best way possible.  We gave them phone sets, we gave them phone settings, we gave them information and that was a fifteen month ago campaign and it’s steady.  We’ve put it on the website, we’ve had it in newspapers, we’ve put it on the television stations, it’s everywhere.  We’ve even directly communicated with them via our sales staff.  In fact, today we’re having a meeting with the distributors to have one more discussion because they seem to feel that they’ve stocked up and we’re being unfair but we mentioned it a year ago.  I would want to think that your stock has been depleted by now.”