When the Vietnamese state owned telco Viettel officially became the majority owner of Haitian national telecommunication company TELECO, it likely had no idea what kind of trouble it was in for.
With Viettel snapping up 60% of Teleco’s shares for a cool $59 million back in April of 2010, the company revamped both its name – to NatCom – and its vision to repair and build out the island’s fiber networks after the massive earthquake of January 2010 wreaked havoc.
Little did NatCom know that this would not be as simple as it sounded.
Entering (or re-entering) Haiti’s telecoms market as a fixed line provider, NatCom has been eyed suspiciously by the three incumbent wireless providers, Digicel with its approximate 66% of the market, Voila with 32% and Haitel with 2%.
Needless to say, NatCom’s plans for covering every inch of the country with fiber optic cables for faster internet connections that could be used for Voice over Internet Protocol calling, has not delighted the mobile players. Nor has its aim to supplement its fixed phone services with mobile. The firm has even said it plans to offer free calling between NatCom customers in the same region.
But while Haiti’s operators keep an eye on their new Vietnamese neighbor, some in the country are not afraid to show their outward aggression towards the firm – in the form of brutal cable cutting.
While some are happy to float conspiracy theories about the corporate nature of the culprits, our sources on the ground in Haiti tell us there may well be a less sophisticated group of malefactors on the prowl.
“In the past most businesses paid a telco employee to make sure their phone lines and data lines stayed up,” our source told us on condition of anonymity.
“If there was a problem the business had one person to call and yell at and they were motivated to fix the problem,” he went on.
These “cable guys” also occasionally intentionally cut the lines of people who didn’t want to employ them, or think they required their services, making it something of a telecom mafia/protection racquet.
“Many of these ex-Teleco employees were used to a steady income stream,” said our source, pointing out that now the firm had changed hands and was controlled by the straight laced Vietnamese, the profiteering cable guys were cut out of the loop.
“They are allegedly cutting the fiber not because they are so much angry at their employer as they are angry that they were cut out of the gravy train,” he explains, citing that the number of disgruntled cable cutters could be in their dozens.
“Many of these ex-employees quit because Teleco basically stopped being able to offer the basic service that was supporting their supplemental revenue stream,” he told us, adding, “nobody in Haiti has a working +509 22xx xxxx phone number.”
“There were thousands of these lines and at least a few hundred that would have paid a few extra bucks a month to keep the service running,” he maintained.
Of course most of that revenue has now been picked up by wireless carriers like Digicel and Voila, but NatCom seems determined not to be deterred by efforts to sabotage its plans.
“They seem to be getting pretty good and fast at fixing their fiber,” said our source.
Whether the damage causes any change to NatCom’s modus operandi remains to be seen, but in the meanwhile, the firm certainly has a lot of cables to fix.
