NASSAU, BAHAMAS — The Utilities Regulation and Competition Authority (URCA) has fined Cable Bahamas 2.025 percent of its monthly recurring pay TV charges for 2021, following a ‘quality of service’ investigation into complaints of recurring outages, error messages, and pixelated channels.
The communication’s regulator in its Final Determination and Order to Cable Bahamas issued November 21 but just posted to its website yesterday noted that the investigation had commenced July 2021 and was in response to numerous complaints from customers following CBL’s price applications to restructure/repackage its pay television packages in October 2020 and January 2021 for residential and business customers respectively.
CBL has thirty days from the issuance of the Final Determination and Order to pay the fine but has already indicated that it plans to launch an appeal against the decision, highlighting the adverse determination in its recently released financial statements for the year to end-June 2022.
URCA said in its decision that it had presented its preliminary findings to Cable Bahamas in August 2022 and received CBL’s response the following month.
“With consideration, URCA ordered the licensee to resolve the error messages and pixelation related to its pay TV services within a three-month period while, at the same time, providing regular communication to its customers and the Regulator. CBL must also complete its set-top box replacement programme as soon as practicably possible,” the regulator noted.
The regulator maintains that the levied 2.025 percent fine, based on recurring pay TV charges for 2021, is commensurate with the investigation’s findings that CBL “was aware of faults on its network and prevented the faults from reoccurring within the 30 days of repair.”
It added: “Additionally, CBL failed to ensure that relevant staff were adequately informed on how to resolve related complaints and that these complaints were indicative of widespread issues that the service provider failed to appropriately address.”
CBL had contended that the Preliminary Determination was based on customer complaints originating from URCA’s consultation document yet the complaints were never presented to CBL “with any degree of specificity.”
The company added that URCA had failed to provide basic information about the complaints including the account numbers, phone numbers, times, and places of the incidents, and had never disclosed any details of its investigation and/or supporting evidence to verify the veracity of the complaints. CBL argued that URCA’s proposed fine was “unfair, disproportionately punitive, and repugnant to the principles of due process”, adding that URCA failed to properly investigate specific customer complaints and neglected to identify the specific root cause of any particular complaint.
The regulator maintained that the proposed fine was due to the length of time with no resolution. However, CBL claimed it was double counting as the length of time was already factored into the proposed fine’s application to one year’s worth of revenue and the additional 10 percent on the basic fine for the duration of the breach.
According to CBL, it invested $45.1 million in network upgrades while it faced a global pandemic and declining revenues. Additionally, the company said that it had installed Fibre to the Home (FTTH) infrastructure in over 5,000 households, had made an FTTH investment within the last 3-4 years of $5.1 million and has already commenced a planned $85 million investment in FTTH with the objective of improving the customer experience.
The company said that while it has committed $85 million to network upgrades, a fine of such magnitude would significantly impact or detract from its ability to continue with its FTTH capital investment to upgrade its existing network.
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