Slashdot Mirror

This is very embarassing, but not a surprise.

This is yet another example of our British friends at Cable & Wireless adapting to the local culture of the country which they're sucking the blood out of. They obviously have quickly learned the Panamenian way of politics and have paid off all the necessary politicians, which can often be bought very cheap.

Cable & Wireless is privatization gone totally wrong. The previous phone company was a government owned company called INTEL, and Cable & Wireless beat US GTE and took over the phone system of Panama. The results have been horrible.

Local calls in Panama used to be like in the US, you paid your minimal fee and could talk all the minutes you wanted. Cable & Wireless brought the wonderful European model of paying for each minute for local calls.

If that wasn't enough, they also charge you per minute (I think) for calls from a land line phone in your house to a cell phone. That is, you pay for calling a cell phone and the person on the cell phone pays too. I had to find this the hard way after making a few calls to some friends from my grandmothers house.

So, people are fed up with them, and the internet savy are using Voice over IP a lot. I used to receive a lot of calls from a cousing over dialpad.com (when it was free). This was the ideal system to make a call to the US, dialpad was for US calls only, but the funny thing is that this worked great if you lived in another country.

Here's a good article on the whole mess Cable & Wireless is creating;

A Case of Privatization Gone Wrong -
Panama's Wires Crossed

Out of simple curiosity, I plugged 'panama phone company' into Google.. after all, what could this little pissant country have in the way of phone companines? And what are the first two links to pop up?

Privatization - Phone Company: and A Case of Privatization Gone Wrong: Panama's Wires Crossed. Perhaps this is the start of some revenue-generating stunt to pull some dumbass decision-maker's ass out of a fire somewhere?

-fester (capt. conspiracy?)

ps.. I'm sure Panamanians by and large dislike this as well.. the 'pissant' is directed at the governmental representation of Panama, which right now looks suspiciously like a boil on someone's ass.

If you do your research, you will find out that there are significant undeveloped oil prospects in the middle east (Afghanistan! ... makes me wonder about the real purpose of the war on terrorism) and in the arctic above Canada.