Competition for email?

Dear Editor, I am sending you this letter in a way that is quite unusual nowadays, by mail through the Post Office. I have to do this because I cannot do email. The internet service I have normally used in Lethem has been unavailable for the last two days. No explanation is forthcoming from the Brazilian ISP who is estimated to serve 90 per cent of internet users in the Lethem area. One doubts he has been shut down for unlicensed use of Guyana’s wireless spectrum. If any authorities are aware of his illegal operation, they tolerate it, because no one in Guyana is competent to supply usable, affordable internet in this locality.

The only other internet connection offered here is by cellphone. Digicel’s data service has been so slow and intermittent that it is quite useless for email or any of a number of other services essential to any pretence to modern life. Maybe I’ll try switching to Gtt, but it seems those two companies are in competition to fleece customers, unrestrained by the authorities who continue to license them, years into empty talks of change.

No use complaining to the PUC or anyone else, for telecommunications is only one of the services in which the exploited consumer is unprotected by any effective regulation. So we are moved to test the mail service, first on the speed of delivery of this letter, mailed on Friday the thirteenth of January. Yours faithfully, Gordon Forte