Hundreds of customers, including business entities and households, are not too happy with the prolonged disruption of their telephone and mobile internet services as a result of the Guyana Telephone and Telegraph’s (GT&T’s) efforts to migrate to its new Integrated Billing and Customer Management System. Since Saturday last, several landlines and mobile subscribers have been experiencing an on-and-off disruption to their communication services, while many others are bemoaning the new mobile phone feature that provides for the checking of their account balances, etc.
Most felt that the telephone company should have embarked on a more vigorous public relations campaign to educate the public on the planned transition, in addition to providing a pool of mini-video demonstrations (or advertisements) on television to familiarise customers with the new changes.
When a confused public began to experience disruption to their BlackBerry and other communication services last weekend, no official information was seemingly available to them.
In a subsequent press release, GT&T acknowledged its customers’ frustration at the service disruptions, while indicating that the Mobile WAP/APN, and BlackBerry services were all stabilised and back to normal.
However, as of yesterday, several customers told this publication that the BlackBerry service and mobile telephone calls, especially those to numbers outside of the GT&T network, were intermittently unachievable.
Independent checks by this newspaper around 12:30hrs yesterday seemed to have substantiated the customers’ claims, as investigative internet browsing and phone calls from two GT&T serviced mobile handsets were not possible, until around 13:00hrs.