By
Guest Writer Ken Westmoreland
The
growth in the popularity of the internet has meant that people can communicate
with each other over great distances, and at no cost, for example, using
services like Skype, Viber and WhatsApp although the traditional Public
Switched Telephone Network is still important, especially when internet
bandwidth is limited and internet connections are poor. Timor-Leste has faced
many challenges in developing its telecommunications since 1999, when Telkom
Indonesia withdrew its services and the infrastructure was destroyed, before
Telstra in Australia operated an interim service, and Timor Telecom began
building and operating its network in 2003.
Unfortunately,
it became very difficult to call Timor-Leste from the rest of the world for
several reasons. One was the confusion over the international code that the
International Telecommunication Union (ITU) gave to Timor-Leste, 670, which
used to be used by the Northern Mariana Islands until 1997, when they adopted
the North American code 1 670. Even now, some telephone companies in the United
States still list a destination called ‘East Timor Saipan’, which means that
people in the United States who call Saipan, and the rest of the
Northern Mariana Islands have to pay for a call to Timor-Leste, which costs
them U$4 a minute!
Another
problem is that not only Timor-Leste did not join the ITU until 2009, but the
cost of calling the country from the rest of the world was so expensive, even
from countries in the Asia Pacific region like Singapore. This is because
telecom operators in other countries had to pay Timor Telecom’s high
termination costs, and even though Timor Telecom has lost its monopoly, and
Telkomcel and Telemor have entered the market, termination costs are still
high. If international telephone companies have to pay Timor Telecom’s high
prices, that means their customers have to pay even higher ones.
Some
companies have begun offering cheaper rates to call Timor-Leste, using the
internet to route calls, but they do this through fraud. Instead of connecting
directly to Timor Telecom, Telkomcel or Telemor in Dili, they hack into a
company’s office telephone system in another country, and then use it to make
calls to Timor-Leste. While customers may be happy because they pay cheaper
rates, and Timor Telecom is happy because it earns revenue from international
call traffic, somebody else has to pay a huge bill. A recent case was when
somebody hacked into a Dutch company’s office telephone system, and
made lots of calls to Timor-Leste, leaving the company with a bill
of 176,895 euros to pay!
Imagine
if somebody started selling iPhones or iPads for only $100, but they used your
credit card or bank account details to buy them for $600 each. That means
you would have to pay full price for things somebody bought without your
permission. It’s the same with this kind of fraud, but worse because Timor
Telecom is charging too much money for something which costs very little to
produce or transport, unlike a phone or a tablet. If Timor Telecom did not make
it so expensive to terminate calls into Timor-Leste, other telecom operators
would have less need to use companies which use fraudulent means.
As
a result of this fraud, Timor-Leste is now on a list of barred destinations,
along with some islands in the Pacific and some countries in Africa, so it is
impossible to call Timor-Leste using many telephone services, including
internet-based services, even if people are willing to pay for the call. I
asked three companies, including Viber, why I could not call numbers in
Timor-Leste, and the response was the same; they had to stop because of
the high level of fraud. I was confused because Timor-Leste is a country
with poor communications infrastructure, and not like Nigeria or Ghana, where
internet fraud is a big problem.
People
in Timor-Leste do use Skype, and increasingly Viber, to talk for free, but they
are not a solution to the problem, they are a symptom of the problem. If people
use them for international calls, it is because they have to use them, as
they are the only services that work, although they depend on a good internet
connection. The irony is that even Fretilin supporters who defended the Timor
Telecom monopoly used Skype to talk to their comrades when they were overseas,
which was undermining the very monopoly they were trying to preserve. If they
can recognise that there is a problem, they should be honest and admit that it
exists!
I
use another internet telephony service to make calls to Timor-Leste, which
costs me only 25 cents a minute, but it is difficult to set up if you do not
have any technical knowledge, so it is no surprise that few people use it. Unlike
other people, I do not like the idea of calling for free because it deprives
Timor Telecom of revenue, which means that people who make calls to Timor-Leste
either have to pay extra, or cannot make calls at all because of fraud. Although
I believe that Timor Telecom has been incompetent, I do not want to destroy it,
nor do I want to destroy Telkomcel or Telemor, because unlike Skype,
Viber or WhatsApp, they provide local jobs.
However,
this is no longer the only kind of phonecall fraud affecting telecommunications
in Timor-Leste, because there is another problem which damages the reputation
of Timor-Leste and other countries in the developing world, the misuse of
telephone numbers for International Premium Rate Number services. What happens
is that companies use telephone numbers in countries where their use is not
tightly regulated, including Timor-Leste but also Guinea in West Africa. They
then make calls or send text messages to people's mobile phones, asking them to
call a number in these countries. In India, many people have fallen victim to
a scam involving calls to numbers in Guinea, which uses the country code
224, which is confused with the area code for Mumbai, which is 22.
For
example, a message that someone in Denmark got from a number in Timor-Leste
asking them to call them back as soon as possible. The curious thing is
that the number featured is a landline number, beginning with the digit ‘3’,
not a mobile number, beginning with the digit ‘7’. In most other countries, the
cost of calling a landline is less than calling a mobile, but as so few people
in Timor-Leste have landline telephones, few call them domestically or
internationally.
Another
problem comes from groups of criminals who steal mobile phones, then call to
extremely expensive numbers in countries like Timor-Leste for extremely long
periods of time, because the company that rents out the number to
them pays them 20 US cents a minute, so therefore they can make a big profit in
just one day. Unfortunately, it’s the victim of these crimes who have to pay
for calls to Timor-Leste, Somalia, Nauru, Guinea and other countries, not the
thief.
It
turns out that there are several companies which offer Timor-Leste
numbers for this purpose, apparently without the knowledge or permission
of either the communications regulator or Timor Telecom. Do they approve of
this?
The
people of Timor-Leste know better than most other people in the world about
fighting for independence and the recognition of that independence by the rest
of the world. The International Telecommunication Union country code for
Timor-Leste is 670, and if the world can accept the existence of an independent
Timor-Leste, it should be able to accept the existence of the code 670. Yes,
the internet has changed the way we communicate with the rest of the world, and
it will continue to change this, but the Public Switched Telephone Network is
still important and in Timor-Leste it should be made to work properly for the
sake of its people and its foreign relations.
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