PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

TSTT has ex­pressed con­cern over some state­ments made by Jus­tice Frank Seep­er­sad dur­ing his rul­ing on the Fixed Num­ber Porta­bil­i­ty mat­ter and may ap­peal his rul­ing.

On Tues­day, Seep­er­sad ruled that the lo­cal ra­dio­com­mu­ni­ca­tions provider is legal­ly ob­lig­at­ed to im­ple­ment fixed num­ber porta­bil­i­ty.

The Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Au­thor­i­ty of  Trinidad and To­ba­go hailed the rul­ing, as they said the coun­try was one step clos­er to the porta­bil­i­ty of fixed num­bers.

TATT said once in place, fixed land­line cus­tomers can change their ser­vice with­out chang­ing their phone num­ber.

How­ev­er TSTT is­sued  a re­lease on Wednes­day, seek­ing to af­firm its stance in the mat­ter.

In the re­lease, TSTT said, “As it re­lates to the re­cent rul­ing, TSTT wish­es to ex­plic­it­ly state that Colum­bus Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Trinidad Lim­it­ed (‘CCTL’) and the reg­u­la­tor, TATT, were the two key par­ties in­volved in the mat­ter.”

The state owned telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions provider con­tin­ued, “Fol­low­ing a pro­ce­dur­al hear­ing, TSTT was joined as an in­ter­est­ed par­ty, for the pur­pos­es of in­ter­pret­ing var­i­ous as­pects of rel­e­vant tele­coms leg­is­la­tion to de­ter­mine whether TSTT had a le­gal oblig­a­tion to im­ple­ment fixed num­ber porta­bil­i­ty. TSTT is con­cerned about some as­pects of the judge­ment and cer­tain state­ments made by the learned judge.”

 TSTT  said it is “care­ful­ly con­sid­er­ing all of its op­tions in­clud­ing whether or not to ap­peal.”

TSTT said, “It is to be not­ed that the Court made no manda­to­ry or­der against TSTT. The Court grant­ed none of the re­lief sought by CCTL and fur­ther con­sid­ered that no prac­ti­cal pur­pose would be achieved by mak­ing any of the de­c­la­ra­tions sought by CCTL.”

The telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pa­ny closed by stat­ing it “is mind­ful of the im­por­tant role that it and all oth­er stake­hold­ers play in the na­tion­al telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions in­dus­try. In this re­gard, TSTT is com­mit­ted to en­sur­ing that its cus­tomers and the gen­er­al pub­lic ben­e­fit from the roll­out of num­ber porta­bil­i­ty in a man­ner that is fair, trans­par­ent, and law­ful.”