7 News Belize

SMART Bluffed On Phone Registration Deadline
posted (March 15, 2012)
Last night we showed you how the cell phone registrations were going at both phone companies.

SMART! had been advertising that today was their deadline for registration, while BTL's communications officer told us that they were using April 12 as prescribed by the Government.

Well, as you might have guessed, with the threat of disconnection looming, a large section of the Belizean public decided to wait until the very last minute rush in and register their numbers at the Speednet offices throughout the country - which caused major lines.

The problem is that today is not the deadline that the Government gave like the company was advertising.

In a press release issued this morning from the Ministry of Police, they explained that Speednet made an error in calculation of the deadline, which gives both companies until April 12 as the day where services would be confiscated for unregistered numbers.

Today, 7News caught a glimpse of the rush to finish up even though there is still one more month left. We also asked Speednet's PR Officer what caused them to get it wrong.

Here's what he had to say:..

Ian Courtenay - Public Relations Manager, Speednet
"Because of complaints and so on coming in to them on the discrepancy between the dates that we have put out and our competitors have put out, they came to clarify the situation with us and it seems that there was a little bit of confusion in terms of when the six months period actually began, because we got our letter dated in September, but in fact the date in which the process was supposed to begin was October 11th I believe. So that would put the deadline, the official deadline in April 11th."

"They just wanted to clear up, to ensure that both companies had enough time and that none of the companies was put in an unfair position and they stated that they were considering extending the whole registration process to ensure that both companies were able to capture as many people who wanted to register their phones before they gave the instructions to cease service to none registered accounts."

Daniel Ortiz
"How serious are they about this extension after April 2012 deadline?"

Ian Courtenay - Public Relations Manager, Speednet
"Well, the representative told me this morning that they were going to make the suggestion to the Ministry of Utilities, the person I spoke to was from the Ministry of National Security and so I suspect once they have confirm and agreed on what the extension time will be then we will get an announcement about that."

"In the meantime we are continuing the process and now we have a grace period to say given the deadline we had publicized to include another month. We want to give customers the opportunity to get this done as quickly as possible, so that when the deadline, wherever that mark is put, our customers will have already completed the process."

"Certainly it was a genuine confusion and we hope that our customers won't be upset with us that they had to come in and endured the lines but, now that it's been done they no longer have to come in at any point, and this also gives us time to ensure our entire customers, because you know we have our postpaid customers and other customers who bought their phone directly from us who already have most of the information already in the system anyway, so that we will go through the process of checking to ensure that everybody has all requirements that the ministry has set out and for those who don't, that we can contact them on a one on one basis and ensure that they come in or send us or give us the relevant information so that we can have everything covered."

We note that at other Speednet corporate branches, there still were long lines of people waiting to get through the process this evening. Some of the company's representatives opted not to inform the people who were already in line about the change, in hopes of getting registered once and for all.

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