In an effort to recover millions of dollars in lost taxes and national income of the National Fund for Education (FNE) for the Government of Haiti, Digicel announced that from June 17, 2014 at midnight, some VoIP services whose Viber, Skype, Tango, Nimbuzz, MagicJack to mention only a few, have been blocked on its network.

Recall that unlicenced VOIP operators like Viber, Nimbuzz and Tango use telecoms networks to deliver their services but do not pay any money for the privilege. With these unauthorised VOIP services putting enormous pressures on bandwidth – and customers’ data usage experience being negatively impacted as a result – Digicel has been forced to take affirmative action and hopes that other operators in Haiti will follow suit.

Discussions with these VOIP providers are ongoing, Digicel is hopeful that these measures will only be temporary and that mutually beneficial commercial relationships can be agreed with them on an individual basis.

Maarten Boute, CEO of Digicel Haiti, explained "It’s time for us to act to protect our business, our customers and our service integrity and to ensure that the Haitian Government gets the monies it is owed. The actions of these unlicenced VOIP operators in contributing nothing to the delivery of these services mean that our customers do not reap the benefits of our significant investment, commitment and focus. We would like to thank customers for their understanding and patience and hope to have a positive result to communicate in the near future. In addition, we hope that the other operators in Haiti will follow our lead so that together we can forge a positive way forward [...]

Two things matter to us above all : our customers and the service we deliver to them. It’s unfortunate that we have been forced to take this step and we do apologise to our valued customers for the inconvenience caused but this is about getting the VOIP operators to agree to pay a reasonable price for the services that, at this point, they are taking from us for free. Just as a consumer would not expect to go to a supermarket and take the goods off the shelves for free, so these VOIP operators must be forced to pay their dues."

HL/ HaitiLibre