TSTT's decision to abandon the tstt.net.tt domain name and force their customers to alternative email services is one more in a string of myopic decisions that have brought the once dominant ISP further down the road of irrelevance.
TSTT's leadership clearly has no clue on how to maintain their market-share.
Despite the widespread availability of free email services for almost 20 years, ISPs all over the planet still continue to provide email services packaged with their internet services. Why is that?
This is because responsible and forward thinking leadership would realise that the key to maintaining and increasing market-share is the value added services that ISPs provide.
In fact, most ISPs worldwide have chosen to increase the range of value added services. The last thing any ISP wants to be seen as is the proverbial "big dump pipe," where ultimately they are just a provider of bandwidth. In that event, as there is no product differentiator, it just becomes a race to the bottom. i.e. competition on price.
Does TSTT's upper management not realise that the only thing keeping a large percentage of their customers tied to their services is that they do not want to lose their existing email addresses? Imagine if we applied this strategy to their phone system. Imagine if TSTT informed all of their customers that they would need to change their land line numbers in 30 days. Customers would invariably flock to alternate services just because of the sheer aggravation they inflicted.
This will ultimately have the same result.
Clearly, TSTT needs to realise that they need to change their business model. Someone needs to tell their upper management that they are no longer a monopoly. They can no longer operate with impunity. They can no longer survive by charging insanely obscene prices for delivering the same frustratingly poor service such as we have grown to accept in WASA and the Licensing Office. They need to stop acting like a public utility and more like a company in an increasingly competitive market.
Iqbal Mohammed,
Cunupia
