PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

On the very day Flow cus­tomers faced its first day with in­creased charges from their provider, Dig­i­cel an­nounced that in one month, their sub­scribers would al­so face in­creased fees.

In a no­tice to cus­tomers on Mon­day, the com­pa­ny con­firmed that rates for most of its cus­tomers would be go­ing up, but all af­fect­ed sub­scribers will re­ceive in­creased speeds of up to 200Mbps.

The com­pa­ny said, "Like every com­pa­ny across the globe, we are deal­ing with the im­pact of sub­stan­tial in­creas­es in the costs of do­ing busi­ness. Not to men­tion here in Trinidad and To­ba­go, in­ter­net us­age has dou­bled when com­pared to pre-pan­dem­ic lev­els, the costs of in­ter­na­tion­al tele­vi­sion con­tent con­tin­ues to rise, and over-the-top (OTT) apps are grow­ing in pop­u­lar­i­ty, in­creas­ing in­ter­net pres­sures and fur­ther dri­ving up our op­er­a­tional costs. Ad­di­tion­al­ly, giv­en the de­mands for more in­ter­net, faster speeds and greater re­li­a­bil­i­ty, we must al­so im­prove the net­work’s re­silience and re­dun­dan­cy to help pre­vent out­ages and down­time in the event of an out­age."

The no­tice con­tin­ued, "Since our ser­vices are on­ly as good as the mon­ey we in­vest in them, we must take ac­tion to en­sure that what we de­liv­er match­es up to what you ex­pect. There­fore, it is against this back­ground that we must im­ple­ment new pack­ages from 01 June 2023 and take this op­por­tu­ni­ty to pro­vide 30 days ad­vance no­tice, which is in line with our com­mit­ment to com­mu­ni­cate open­ly with our cus­tomers."

Dig­i­cel in the no­tice ac­knowl­edged it had suf­fered a ma­jor out­age re­cent­ly and al­so that it had raised its rate twice in the last 12 months.

While is in­crease last year was based on the same rea­sons giv­en on Mon­day, it not­ed its Feb­ru­ary ad­just­ment was re­lat­ed to " 1 spe­cif­ic plan, the va­ri­ety-200, which had ad­di­tion­al val­ue-added be­yond the in­crease in price."

It ex­plained that un­der the new pack­age, its base deal would move from the Fi­bre 150 to the Fi­bre 200, and would see cus­tomers' bills in­crease by $20 from $285 to $ $305, while its TV and in­ter­net coun­ter­part the Mod­ern Fi­bre 100, as well as the Mod­ern Fi­bre 150 bun­dle, rise by $15 to $325 and $390 re­spec­tive­ly.

While the vast ma­jor­i­ty of the pack­ages would see in­creas­es rang­ing from $15 to $60, some af­fect­ed pack­ages will in­crease by as much as $331, ac­cord­ing to the com­pa­ny.

Last month, Flow an­nounced its rates would be in­creas­ing by 3.5 per cent on May 1, 2023 due to ex­ter­nal eco­nom­ic pres­sures.