An­drea Perez-Sobers

Se­nior Re­porter

an­drea.perez-sobers@guardian.co.tt

Come April 7, bmo­bile's post-paid cus­tomers who are on its lega­cy plan, are be­ing re­quest­ed to pay 14.61 per cent more to be up­grad­ed to its Ex­treme Plus plan, which the mo­bile ser­vice provider says of­fers more val­ue.

In a no­tice to its post-paid cus­tomers on Wednes­day, bmo­bile said the 4G Pre­ferred Plan, which costs $392.63 in­clud­ing VAT, will be re­tired ef­fec­tive April 6, when those cus­tomers would pay $450 VAT in­clu­sive for its Ex­treme Plus plan.  

The no­tice to cus­tomers said this up­grad­ed plan in­cludes 450 gi­ga­bytes (GB) of da­ta, free bmo­bile calls, free any­where mins, free b-da­ta, rollover da­ta and any­where min­utes, and 3 GB of roam­ing da­ta.

A sim­i­lar no­tice was sent to cus­tomers on Nov 1, 2024, alert­ing cus­tomers that bmo­bile would be re­tir­ing four post-paid plans cost­ing $149 a month on De­cem­ber 1, 2024. Those plans were bmo­bile ba­sic, bmo­bile bonus, the one plan and the stu­dent link plan. Those four plans now cost $200 a month, VAT in­clu­sive.

The price of com­pa­ny's 4GStar and 4G Es­sen­tial plans was $239, but now stand at $295 VAT in­clu­sive.

Re­spond­ing to Guardian Me­dia Ltd’s query on the move, Kashif Greaves, TSTT's as­sis­tant vice pres­i­dent of con­sumer sales, said re­view­ing and up­dat­ing plans is a stan­dard as­pect of telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions op­er­a­tions as it en­sure that its prod­uct port­fo­lio re­mains rel­e­vant and aligned with cus­tomer ex­pec­ta­tions.

“Fol­low­ing our lat­est as­sess­ment, we have re­tired a small num­ber of lega­cy plans—each hav­ing been in place for an av­er­age of four to five years—and will be tran­si­tion­ing these cus­tomers to ex­ist­ing plans that pro­vide greater ben­e­fits, of­fer­ing more val­ue for cus­tomers.

"While on­ly a small per­cent­age of cus­tomers are im­pact­ed, we are com­mit­ted to mak­ing this tran­si­tion as smooth as pos­si­ble while con­tin­u­ing to de­liv­er the best val­ue and ser­vice to all our cus­tomers,” Greaves ex­plained.

A cus­tomer called the bmo­bile care agents' line to query how much da­ta was used on his soon-to-be-re­tired $392.63 plan for the last three months, but the in­for­ma­tion was not forth­com­ing at the time.

Cus­tomers called Guardian Me­dia’s PBX line to ex­press con­cern about the $57.48 in­crease that will take ef­fect next month.

“I un­der­stand the plan is be­ing re­tired, but every­thing is go­ing up, ex­cept your salary. In June 2020, Bmo­bile up­grad­ed all of its mo­bile plans, and cus­tomers re­ceived im­proved phone pack­ages at no ad­di­tion­al cost. Why could this not be done," one cus­tomer lament­ed.

An­oth­er cus­tomer, who took to Face­book, said, "If a plan is re­tir­ing it means that you are ob­lig­at­ed to take the new plan and if you down­grade, that means you will get less of every­thing so I will have to move with the flow," the cus­tomer added.

In its quar­ter­ly re­port for the third quar­ter of 2024, the Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Au­thor­i­ty of Trinidad and To­ba­go (TATT) re­port­ed that T&T had 1,787,400 mo­bile voice sub­scrip­tions with 1,454,500 be­ing pre paid and 332,900 be­ing post paid. That means 18.62 per cent of the mo­bile voice sub­scrip­tions were post paid and 81.38 per cent were pre paid.

Com­pared to Sep­tem­ber 2023, the TATT da­ta in­di­cate that to­tal mo­bile mo­bile voice sub­scrip­tions de­clined by 11.66 per cent from 2,023,500 to 1,787,400.

Post-paid mo­bile voice sub­scrip­tions de­clined by 33.92 per cent, drop­ping from 503,800 in Sep­tem­ber 2023 to 332,900 in Sep­tem­ber 2024.