PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

Se­nior Re­porter

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

Ca­ble and in­ter­net sub­scribers will once again face the pos­si­bil­i­ty of dig­ging deep­er in­to their pock­ets, af­ter both Dig­i­cel and Flow in­formed cus­tomers yes­ter­day of price in­creas­es that will take ef­fect from June.

In a no­tice to cus­tomers, which has been post­ed on its web­site, Dig­i­cel said, “As part of our on­go­ing ef­forts to main­tain the qual­i­ty and re­li­a­bil­i­ty of your Dig­i­cel+ ex­pe­ri­ence, we must ad­just the pric­ing of cer­tain prod­ucts with­in our port­fo­lio, as well as roll out new ser­vice pack­ages start­ing from June 1, 2024.”

Dig­i­cel said the de­ci­sion to raise prices was in­flu­enced by the in­creased costs in­curred by the com­pa­ny as a re­sult in­creased band­width de­mands for in­ter­na­tion­al stream­ing ser­vices.

Dig­i­cel said, “Due to in­creased con­tent costs from our in­ter­na­tion­al sup­pli­ers and the grow­ing ex­pens­es as­so­ci­at­ed with off-is­land in­ter­net traf­fic, pri­mar­i­ly fu­elled by the ris­ing us­age of An­droid TV box­es, Net­flix, and oth­er over-the-top (OTT) ser­vices, our net­work faces ad­di­tion­al strain. There­fore, we’re com­pelled to im­ple­ment ad­just­ments ac­cord­ing­ly.”

The com­pa­ny con­firmed the plans that were im­pact­ed in­clud­ed:

The Fi­bre 200 (from $305 to $320)— +4.91%;

Mod­ern Fi­bre 200 ($325 to 340)— +4.61%

Mod­ern Fi­bre 200+ ($390 to 410)— +5.12%%

How­ev­er Dig­i­cel did al­so an­nounce price re­duc­tions for:

Fi­bre 350 ($745 - $445)— -40.26%;

Fi­bre 500 ($885 -500)— -43.50%;

Mod­ern Fi­bre 350 ($745 to $465)— -37.58% and

Mod­ern Fi­bre 500 ($885-$600)— -32.20% pack­ages.

Dig­i­cel said con­cern­ing those re­duc­tions, “We recog­nised that we didn’t of­fer our cus­tomers af­ford­able ac­cess to high­er in­ter­net speeds. With these price changes we aim to ad­dress this.”

Flow, which in March an­nounced price in­crease for se­lect pack­ages be­gin­ning April 1, was more nu­anced in its no­tice.

The com­pa­ny said in a no­tice to se­lect cus­tomers, “At Flow, like most oth­er com­pa­nies across the coun­try, we are faced with ris­ing op­er­a­tional costs that con­tin­ue to put ad­di­tion­al eco­nom­ic pres­sure on us. De­spite our best ef­forts, we are faced with in­creas­ing prices.

Ef­fec­tive June 1, 2024, the month­ly sub­scrip­tion for your Flow pack­age will in­crease slight­ly by 5 per cent.

This ad­just­ment will en­able us to con­tin­ue in­vest­ing in the nec­es­sary im­prove­ments to en­hance your over­all ex­pe­ri­ence.”

The pack­ages af­fect­ed by this in­crease are the ca­ble and in­ter­net bun­dle pack­ages:

Every­thing You Want ($555 to $583)— +5.04%;

Every­thing You Want Boost It (up to $625) and

Every­thing You Want and More ($645 to $677)— +4.96%;

Flow al­so an­nounced an in­creased to its 1 Gb in­ter­net pack­age to $892.50.

Both Dig­i­cel and Flow al­so an­nounced price in­creas­es last year.

Re­cent­ly, the Busi­ness Guardian re­port­ed that stream­ing ser­vices in­clud­ing Net­flix and YouTube com­mand­ed a sig­nif­i­cant chunk and band­width from lo­cal providers, and its ad­verse ef­fect on lo­cal telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion providers due to the lack of re­turns to the Caribbean from these ser­vices de­spite ris­ing rev­enues earned from the re­gion.

Since 2023, re­gion­al op­er­a­tors in­clud­ing Dig­i­cel and TSTT have lob­bied for fair share from big tech com­pa­nies Meta (Face­book, In­sta­gram and What­sApp), Al­pha­bet (Google), Tik­Tok, Net­flix, Ama­zon and Mi­crosoft who are re­spon­si­ble for 67 per cent of the to­tal in­ter­net traf­fic in the Caribbean, while mak­ing no con­tri­bu­tion or in­vest­ment to lo­cal de­liv­ery net­works.