While I was in the office of the chief executive officer of Melita Cable plc, in the Gasan Centre in Mriehel, on October 10, the final versions of the interconnection agreement with Maltacom were being finalised. The interview with Ing. Philip Micallef, who has been in the post for a little more than three months, is interrupted but he soon returns, beaming his smile, satisfied that the deal to enable Melita's Hello customers and Maltacom fixed line customers to 'connect' has been concluded.
Mr Micallef does not dwell on this much, now that it has been sealed, apart from affirming that the deal has been awaiting signature since before his arrival at Melita last July and that, for three months, there had been no communication between the two companies whatsoever.
He believes the agreement is a step in the right direction, both for the companies and the consumer, who now has a choice, and looks forward to "healthy competition between the two companies" since the interconnection is "one of the prime principles of telecom competition".
Still, he asks to rebut "what (Mr) Sonny (Portelli, Maltacom's chairman), who is a very good friend of mine, said that we are a monopoly in television. For me, a monopoly is when you don't have a choice. In telephony, yes, they are a monopoly because till today there was no choice.
"If you look at television, you've got Multiplus, satellite and the aerial. So, people have a wide choice, whether they want to watch a football match on whichever medium they want to watch." He affirms that Melita, who are present in 75 per cent of households, are "one of the leading players" and "a strong player" but not a monopoly.
Mr Micallef was appointed CEO at Melita following the premature departure of Professor Juanito Camilleri, who had been in the post for just eight months and left to become Rector of the University of Malta.
"I found a very young, dynamic organisation with a very loyal workforce. I've worked abroad in many countries - Spain, Switzerland, France - and what I've seen here is exceptional: the attitude of the people.
"Maybe because my two and a half years at Malta Enterprise (he was ME's first CEO from January, 2004, to last June) gave me another perspective, here I don't have to convince people why they have to do things. I found a company culture of 'let's roll up our sleeves and do things'
"In fact people come here with ideas. My challenge is to hold people, put in some formal procedures in certain things that we do but I must be careful not to stifle this enthusiasm, which is a good thing."
He was full of praise, too, for the all-Maltese management team, despite the company being 50 per cent owned by an American company, Liberty Global. "The managers are also very experienced people. They have gone up through the ranks. Some of them have been 10, 15 years; others four years. So they understand the problems..."
Apart from finding a positive culture, Mr Micallef said there is also an eagerness for people to discuss problems. "I have regular meetings with all groups - customer care, service technicians, network engineers, sales and marketing, finance and the back office - to discuss problems, the way we can improve things, what needs to be done."
His two main areas of focus are currently customer care and content. He takes a direct, personal interest in all letters of complaint that are received and is determined to "listen to every complaint to see where we went wrong and how we can improve". He then decides whether to write back, ask the PA to do so or even phone the person back to get to the bottom of things.
"For me it is fundamental that customer care is at the forefront of what we are doing. We can only improve customer care by listening to what our customers tell us and we have to be receptive to what they tell us. Sometimes some of the things they tell us will not be possible but we have a duty to explain to them why we are doing things in such a way."
He gives as an example the English resident in Mellieha who complains that the programme list published in the newspaper for the BBC is not always correct. Although Melita pays the BBC to give them the schedule, it has no way to check whether this is correct and it has written to the BBC telling them of the complaint and asking them to make sure they are more up to date. "So, even when it is not our fault, I tell my people that we must try to explain to the customer and see what we can do about it."
Mr Micallef is eminently qualified to handle this task, having spent four years in Paris before joining Malta Enterprise working for France Telecom Equant (the mobile phone arm), now merged with Orange, where he had global responsibility for all customer service operations as well as the integration of customer operations from three merged organisations across Europe, Africa and the Middle East. He was also responsible for Carrier Relations and Regulatory Matters for France Telecom Equant in Southern Europe.
An electrical engineer by training, Mr Micallef, who graduated with a B.Sc. (Eng.) from the University of Malta, speaks six languages and also has an MBA from the University of Warwick. He brings with him over 20 years' experience in middle and senior management roles with various organisations in the ICT and telecommunication sectors across Europe.
He considers the many years he spent with Olivetti in Italy, USA, Switzerland and Spain, as an education. He has also worked with SITA (Société Internationale de Telecommunications Aeronautique) in Malta and France, the MSU in Malta and France Telecom in France. At Malta Enterprise he had the task of merging three former Government agencies, and formulating and implementing a new strategy which included attracting foreign direct investment in high-value added sectors such as pharmaceuticals, ICT, back-office operations, high-end electronics and aviation engineering.
In terms of Melita's content, Mr Micallef is satisfied that in the area of sports it is "very rich", going on to list not just football, with the World Cup, Champions League and the British Premier League, but also events like golf tournaments, ATP tennis, the Rugby Six Nations Games and other internationals.
He explains that contractual obligations sometimes do not permit Melita to tamper at all with the incoming feed. This is why up-to-the-minute results of other matches cannot be shown on screen and another channel, the Weather Channel, is used for this. It is also not possible to get an English or Italian commentary for games that do not involve these countries.
Going back to the controversy over the World Cup last summer, he explains: "When you buy your TV rights, they are exclusive for the country. So, the rights for RAI are not for Malta. What we get through the aerial is what they call spill-over. In theory, RAI has no right to show Formula One or the World Cup in Malta.
"The TV rights holder who sold us Formula One and the World Cup expected us naturally to block RAI on our own network when they were showing a football match. This is what happens abroad." He gave a personal experience of when he was in France: the cable company Noos blocked the broadcast of Italian and Spanish football, which he loves, because of this rights issue.
Following the clamour in Malta, with politicians from both sides coming into the fray, Mr Micallef said the Office of Fair Competition decided that for three months Melita could not block any stations. "Now they are about to give a final sentence. Whatever the OFC decides, we will abide by it, but if the situation is going to be prolonged it will make us think twice whether to pay that amount of money for some TV rights which people can watch for free."
Other areas of content are the movies, which are expensive to acquire because of the local piracy issue, and new channels, like the newly added Cartoon Network 2. Sitcoms and the Comedy Channel, he says, are popular but some Maltese programmes hold their own, including Xarabank and Tista' Tkun Int.
One area Melita is not known for, but Mr Micallef says is quite strong in, with a potential for growth, is the provision of IT services to businesses. "We sell network and telecoms equipment and have some large customers, like STMicroelectronics and Vodafone.
"We won the network contract for the Mater Dei Hospital, providing a tailor-made solution, put in a fibre link around the University of Malta - jointly with Maltacom (and) we also work jointly with them on a project for MITTS to provide Government with network equipment and fibre for the Magnet, the Government information network. That has worked very well.
"Coming back to the interconnection, I see areas of collaboration between all telecom companies - with Vodafone and Maltacom. I think there are also synergies."
With digital, Mr Micallef sees a bright future for Melita. "Digital opens up a world of opportunities, so you can hear Euronews in one of four languages: Italian, German, French and English. Another opportunity is video on demand, and there we come back to the piracy issue. We are working on a business model and we are trying to see how we can solve that.
"Then we are examining personal video recorders, where basically in your set top box you can record what you want to see whatever time it is shown. This is an integrated solution.
"Another area we are looking into is high definition TV. We currently have trials going on. The problem is that the TV rights for programmes transmitted in HD TV are quite high; the Premier League would charge you an extra Lm1,000 to transmit it to you in HD TV, so at the moment it is not yet economically feasible."
Melita is currently waiting for regulatory approval to bundle its services, offering a competitive price for TV, Internet and telephony all together. This is currently possible only for special offers, like those at the IT&T Fair.
"I think the future is bundling of services. You get all your services from one provider: you have one bill, one Help Desk number. If something goes wrong, you just dial one number and you have a single point of contact. And again, here, you come to customer care. That's something Melita is in a very good position to provide.
Looking to the future, he sees telecoms evolving into when he termed "the digital intelligent home", with devices intuitively programmed to cross refer. As an example, Mr Micallef said the TV would monitor the weather to instruct the automatic watering system on whether to water the garden; mobile phones switching to a fixed line as soon as you enter the house and the ability to program devices, like your personal video recorder remotely. "I think Melita is positioned extremely well to move in that direction," he said.