LIME offering 60 cents a minute to mobile users

Customers of LIME will have much to talk about, thanks to new rates introduced by the company today, as the war between mobile telecommunications providers heats up.{{more}}

As of midnight tonight, users of the mobile network will now pay 60 cents a minute across the board, to any network, at any time to anywhere in the region, under the company’s “Start Calling Now” campaign.

“So, there’s no more off-peak, no more peak, no more Caribbean, there’s one rate that covers all those, whether its day night, weekend or Caribbean,” Leslie Jack, general manager of LIME told reporters on Tuesday afternoon.

“Whether you’re calling “digi”, whether you’re calling LIME, one rate covers all: fixed line and mobile. It’s a matter of simplifying the way people make calls; you don’t have to study when, who, or where across networks; same 60 cents; you must have a LIME phone and starting from midnight Friday.”

Jack said that customers would save from ten cents to 26 cents with the new rate, which he said would benefit LIME customers, as well as customers of the Digicel network.

He also stated that the new rate does not affect the 3/57 campaign, which allows LIME callers to talk for free after three minutes of their call.

Under the old rates, LIME-to-LIME mobile calls were 75 cents per minute during peak time. LIME to Digicel cost 86 cents, and LIME to fixed line was 70 cents per minute.

Jack said that the decision to lower rates was a decision made at the local level, sanctioned by its head office.

He noted that decisions made in St Vincent and the Grenadines have in the past been adopted by neighbouring offices, and expects this latest venture to be one of them.

The company’s decision, he said, has nothing to do with ongoing negotiations with Digicel on the Mobile Termination Rates (MTR), which is the rate that the networks pay each other, when their customers call the other’s network.

“We are not waiting on NTRC, we are not waiting on ECTEL, neither are we waiting on Digicel to negotiate lower MTRs to deliver lower rates to the consumer. We’re doing it now, regardless.

“St Vincent and the Grenadines has been unique in a lot of things. A lot of things have been copied here throughout the region; we have been leading in service delivery, shopping scores, and we’ve done independent surveys to test the customer service satisfaction for all our lines of businesses, which have turned out to be very positive, and as a result, they’ve been using some of the models which were created here in a lot of their businesses throughout the Caribbean,” Jack stated.