Whither the OUR?

published: Friday | July 16, 2004
By Dennie Quill, Contributor
http://www.jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20040716/cleisure/cleisure4.html

I WISH someone would grant me this one favour. I want to be a fly on the wall in the Office of Utility Regulations (OUR). You see, I have always wondered about the agency's mandate. Last week this wonderment went up several notches after a friend related the experience he had with his telecoms provider and the asinine response he received from the OUR regulator.

My friend who runs a small business in Kingston signed up for ADSL service with Cable and Wireless (C&W) for his operations, demanding that he be in constant touch with his overseas associates. He knows there are real benefits to be gained by employing the new information and communication technologies.

He was warned by another associate who had experienced horrors with the service, but being a loyal Cable & Wireless customer he ignored the sage advice and signed up anyway. But the frustrations and rudeness that he encountered while dealing with C&W technicians is a story for another time.

Anyway, he paid his significant fee, got hooked up and he was good to go. For a couple of days he was in hog's heaven as things were moving along smoothly. But before the week was out he lost his service. And every week thereafter there were unexplained outages. After nearly a day without service and galled by the inane C&W responses, he called the OUR, thinking there must be sanctions for a company that provides such sloppy service.

What bothered him was the seeming lack of concern by C&W personnel who were offering a service which they appear quite incapable of delivering. No one was able to explain the root cause of the problem. In the meantime his business was suffering and he was fast losing credibility in the marketplace.

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