The de­ci­sion on how to treat with cus­tomers us­ing VOIP is based on what each lo­cal mo­bile provider knows of the ca­pa­bil­i­ties of its net­work, TSTT said in a me­dia re­lease yes­ter­day.It came on the heels of a Sun­day Guardian re­port which stat­ed that sole lo­cal com­peti­tor Dig­i­cel had banned pop­u­lar voice-over-in­ter­net ap­pli­ca­tions like Viber, Tan­go and Nim­buzz, which al­low smart­phone users to make free calls over the In­ter­net.

While main­tain­ing that its mo­bile com­pa­ny bmo­bile, "de­clines from of­fer­ing any com­ment on Dig­i­cel's de­ci­sion to block VOIP ser­vice providers," TSTT said that its per­spec­tive had been that "once cus­tomers have bought da­ta ser­vices from bmo­bile, cus­tomers de­ter­mine how much they wish to use their da­ta."They fur­ther ex­plained that in en­ter­ing the 4G mar­ket, bmo­bile did not take a "one size fits all" ap­proach and built a large wi-fi net­work of 50 b zones that not on­ly help cus­tomers "con­serve the da­ta bun­dles they pay for" but al­so take traf­fic off the 4G net­work al­low­ing "oth­er cus­tomers who chose to use their 4G da­ta bun­dles to do so with­out any in­con­ve­nience."

In an e-mail ex­change with the Sun­day Guardian about the Dig­i­cel app ban, Dig­i­cel's com­mu­ni­ca­tions man­ag­er Pen­ny Gomez said that be­cause VOIP ser­vices were net­work in­ten­sive and giv­en pri­or­i­ty in terms of de­liv­ery across the net­work, it in turn meant that "oth­er cus­tomers' brows­ing will be im­pact­ed." The TSTT re­lease made it clear that was not a prob­lem shared by b mo­bile cus­tomers.On Sat­ur­day, Dig­i­cel, who had al­ready banned the apps in Ja­maica and Haiti, sent text mes­sages to its T&T da­ta cus­tomers mak­ing them aware of the ban and pub­lished a pub­lic ad­vi­so­ry on its Web site that "ef­fec­tive im­me­di­ate­ly, un­li­censed VOIP ser­vices are blocked on its net­work."

The state­ment added that VOIP op­er­a­tors, like Viber and Nim­buzz, "use tele­coms net­works to de­liv­er their ser­vices but do not pay the req­ui­site mon­ey for the priv­i­lege."Dig­i­cel CEO John Delves said in a com­pa­ny re­lease yes­ter­day on Twit­ter that he "is stand­ing by his com­pa­ny's de­ci­sion to block un­li­censed VOIP ser­vices on its net­work," de­spite crit­i­cism from its cus­tomers, some of whom used Face­book as a fo­rum to voice their dis­plea­sure say­ing that they now in­tend­ed to leave the net­work for bmo­bile, ques­tioned whether Skype would soon be added to the banned list, and how it was pos­si­ble for oth­er com­pa­nies to han­dle the "enor­mous pres­sure" while Dig­i­cel could not.