On Friday, we told you about the decision that BTL announced to restrict phones that were locked to international networks because they eat up bandwidth on the 4G data network. The ones who stood to lose the most in investments were the phone vendors who have thousands of dollars' worth of these phones in stock.
Well, it seems that the problem is not caused by all those internationally locked phones. As we told you, the announcement seemed to suggest that all phones that are preset to international networks such as T-Mobile and AT&T, were at risk of being blocked from the network if they couldn't connect automatically. BTL senior staffers had a meeting today with a number of the major phone distributors, and a clarification was forthcoming. About an hour before news time, the general manager of Customer Services at BTL explained it:
Dr. Dionne Miranda, General Manager of Customer Services
"One of the first things that they brought up was the fact that there was a little bot of de-marketing of their being able to sell their phones and we wanted the entire public to understand first of all that when a phone is lock and is proprietary to another phone company and it's only working with a plan and it comes into the Belizean environment, if it is able to be unlocked and you can see the setting clearly and we can then set it to either it be 3G, 4G or WCDMA then it will be able to work on our network. However, when it is an unlocked phone, when it becomes unlocked - we are saying that if you have a phone that's locked still bring it in and get it checked out and get it unlocked so that you can use it. The issue is when we cannot reach the settings which is what are the problems that we have been having and I'd like to share with you. We have right now a phone that you cannot find the settings. When you cannot find the settings that is where the problem actually occurs."
"Now the question is why it is such an urgent an issue all of a sudden and like I had mention to some of you if the fact that these phones are what we called intelligent phones. They will zone in to the highest service that is available and so they hook on automatically to BTL's 4G service. So even though a customer only wants 2G and they just want voice, the phone automatically decides to go to the higher level setting on that phone that it can find which is typically 4G. What is does like I mention is that it eats up the resources of the network and it is burdening the network at a rate that it is causing the latency of the data issues that I had mentioned earlier and it affects the level of service that we can provide to our customers."
"Now we want for the distributors and us to have a partnership and like I had mentioned to you earlier we don't want a big inventory, we are not a phone store, we are a service provider. We want to be able to work with them, but at the end of the day we have to ensure that the phones that are being used can work with the actual service. So I am not saying that when you go and buy a phone, not to go and purchase a phone, the reality is just check it before, make sure it works and we are going to be working along with these distributors to make sure that their phones are able to work. we are going to look into the systems and see how well we can get that to work, but at the end of the day we have to ensure that we have quality phones that have the settings that are necessary to be working on the network to give optimal service to our existing customer base which is not being affected at all."
So, again, not all those internationally locked phones will be restricted. BTL is asking customers to check if their phones can change network setting between 2G and 3G and WCDMA. If the phones can do this, then they can be unlocked, and BTL will allow them to work on their network because they won't cause the network lag that the company has identified. This comes as very good news to the phone distributors because their high-end T-Mobile and AT&T devices – with those handsome price tags – more than likely have this feature, and they will be able to continue selling those phones to customers.
