Please allow me this space to express my disgust at justice in our society. It highly concerns me that while those found assisting the company GlobalTel in their cheaper phone rate efforts will receive a hefty fine of $50,000 and a two year sentence, a father convicted of beating an innocent five month old baby just a few days before for vomiting receives a six-month jail sentence.

Let's talk about sick and backward! Need I remind the public of the countless other crimes committed by murderers, rapists, abusers and thieves in which the consequences and publicity of their crime do not even come close to the attention afforded to this call back company. Who is the system supposed to protect? DISGUSTED Warwick Callback is detrimental January 15, 2001 Dear Sir, Thank you for allowing me the space to respond to a Letter to the Editor.

`Price check on phone' of January 12. I agree with the reader who calls himself COMPETITION IS GOOD. I also agree with the sentiment.

I feel a duty to offer information to the public to help consumers understand the nature of the telecommunications industry.

For the sake of accurate public opinion, it should be made clear that while some international calls are billed through BTC monthly statements, carriers TeleBermuda and Cable & Wireless dictate the rates. While the reader is accurate in his/her assumption that the long distance carriers that have traditionally served Bermuda have "been grossly over-charging all these years'' it is in fact the Government and Logic who have finally made it possible for consumers to get a good deal.

With the Minister of Telecommunications and E-commerce Renee Webb's decision on June 8th, clarifying that Class `C' licence holders such as Logic could enter the long distance phone market, international calling rates have plummeted. The credit for introduced competition must go to the Minister and to Logic for coming on board with a third world-class long distance service in a prompt fashion. Callback services as the reader has suggested, are not responsible.

The public should be aware that while competition is good, callback services such as GlobalTel are detrimental to the local telecommunications industry.

Bermuda's telecommunications companies have invested in the local infrastructure, improving services and creating employment. Callback services invest nothing into our community.

The LogicPhone long distance service is accessible from any residential or business telephone including cellular phones and the consumer can connect to any destination and 1-800 numbers. A computer is NOT needed to access the service.

Logic Communications continues to deploy the recent advances in technology to leverage its quality infrastructure in both Internet and phone services and is able to provide residents with quality service at a lower price in both. Now consumers are seeing the real benefits with the recent introduction of Bundled Packages that provide savings all round; 10 hours FREE Internet access and even lower phone rates.

NEIL SPEIGHT President Logic Communications Lay off the cruise ships! January 17, 2001 Dear Sir, To comment further on your tourism Editorial, we all might bear in mind that travel, once a novelty in itself, is increasingly viewed as something to put up with -- suffered only to experience and enjoy the destination. The downside of a travel vacation has become the business of getting there, through crowded airports and on jammed planes with appalling service, and then staying in mediocre hotels that are much the same everywhere. Today's affluent men and women will have had a surfeit of all of them in their everyday business lives.

So, when there is the option of taking a cruise to a desired destination, it is a nice change from the usual slog, and effectively becomes a pleasant and stimulating addition to the overall experience. For the hotel industry, the unpalatable fact is that for many, a cruise is now a novel relief from the workaday, airport-hotel business grind.

You point out that our cruise-visitors only spend $217 each, and suggest their presence may well deter the `top end' air visitor who spends a princely $1,292. If, as you report, the average hotel visitor spends 5.3 nights in Bermuda, he or she will be paying roughly $175 each (a conservative $350 double occupancy, meals, gratuities and taxes) per night to stay at a hotel.

This adds up to $927 of the $1292, leaving $365 each to get to and from the airport, and to spend on what they came to Bermuda to enjoy; the Bermudian tourism attractions, sightseeing, scooter rental, the Dockyard, St. Georges, restaurants, the beaches, shopping, etc. Divided by five nights, which is six days, the $417 becomes $61 per day from which airport transfers must be subtracted.

Compared to that, the cruise visitor's average stay is perforce shorter, perhaps an average of three days at best when averaging in the one-day calls.

An expenditure of $217 each, when divided by three, is $72 per day, tax and gratuity free, to spend on the island's broader and entirely Bermudian tourism industry, and without a portion lost to airport transfer expenses.

While there is obviously some cross-over advertising benefit to both, the Tourism Ministry expense to the Bermuda taxpayer of attracting one air/hotel visitor is about $260, each, while the cruise industry pays its own promotional expenses. Additionally, the cruise passenger is socked a hefty hidden tax simply to get off the ship, and, the ship pays very substantial tug, pilotage and wharfage fees.

Therefore, even conservatively calculated, the spending power of cruise-visitors are certainly unfairly judged and the suggestion that they may drive `top end' air visitors away, is little more than an idea propounded by hotel interests not concerned with the broader Bermudian tourism industry.

These visitors are, after all, the same people from the same country and may well be our best word-of-mouth advertisers there, as opposed to the air visitors who leave, soured by the air-hotel price experience, unlikely to return, and bad-mouthing Bermuda to all who will listen. It is certain that in this day and age, price/value parity with the competition is critical. The price must be right, and Bermuda's price is clearly right, as the fully booked ships prove, if a visitor is able to circumvent the planes and hotels. Many believe that the wealthier the spender, the more important it is that the price/value is not out of line.

Obviously, some of the hotel bill still ends up in the pockets of Belco and the rapidly less significant number of Bermudians still employed by the hotels, which like the ships, are effectively foreign owned. Another fallacy that air/hotel interests do nothing to dispel, for obvious reasons, is that if the Government dispensed with the ships, the 200,000 erstwhile passengers would have no alternative but accept the airfares and fill the hotels. Sadly for us, but obviously to any objective observer, this wishful thinking would only send the passengers to other, welcoming, cruise destinations, leaving the broader Bermudian sector of our industry, effectively the visitors' destination, truly destitute; `sunk' was your word. The logical extension of all this, in the interests of Bermuda as a whole, is that if the hotel industry is a dinosaur, bound for extinction, we should work toward an extended season cruise service, spread evenly throughout the Island and the week, providing the Bermudian tourism industry with a visitor presence similar to that once provided by the hotels.

OSTRICH