Cable Bahamas has reported that the Utilities Regulation and Competition Authority (URCA) is unable to regulate their services in Freeport, enabling Cable Bahamas to essentially alter their prices and services in Grand Bahama.
According to The Tribune’s Neil Hartnell, Cable Bahamas’ head of marketing, David Burrows, claimed that URCA had “no jurisdiction” to announce a 27 per cent increase in the price of its SuperBasic cable TV product, or regulate any aspect of its Cable Freeport subsidiary’s operations.
“URCA doesn’t have any jurisdiction over what happens in Freeport,” Mr. Burrows told The Tribune. “The price of our services is not regulated in Freeport. As I understand it, as of today, URCA would not have any regulatory authority over Cable Freeport. It is not under URCA.”
Despite Mr. Burrows’s claim that Cable Freeport could “raise its rates right now”, he’s confident it would not. He also added that Cable Bahamas’ Freeport subsidiary would fall into line with URCA’s decision and offer identical pricing and services, saying to do anything else would be “too complicated”.
“It would complicate things too much,” Mr. Burrows told The Tribune. “It would complicate marketing, it would complicate communications, it would complicate everything.”
Furthermore, Mr. Burrows explained to The Tribune that Cable Freeport’s prices and services would continue in line with those of Cable Bahamas, as it would be difficult to offer alternative packages to different islands.
“It would create too much confusion,” Mr. Burrows told The Tribune. “There are so many different implications when you try to do that in a country the size of the Bahamas.”
Mr. Burrows also added that American cable operators such as Xfinity were only able to split their market in different US states because these territories had a larger populations than the Bahamas.