Bogota Blogger

Utilities in Bogota are attached to the property, and therefore the responsibility of the property owner. This means that the telephone number goes with the house, and whoever moves in or out will have that number. So, you might get calls on your phone for someone who lived there three or four tenants ago. The same is true or the other utilites–the service is attached to the property, not the occupant.

This has a couple of implications–one being that the tenant has no choice in what services are provided and who provides them. I suppose this didn’t used to be an issue when there was just one company for each public utility, but these days there are several companies who provide telephone service, for example, and the landlord gets to decide who will provide it in his property.

In addition, billing for utilities generally runs three months behind, so you will receive a bill for your January usage in April. Therefore, if you move out of a rented apartment, the landlord wants three months worth of utilities payments in advance, so he can pay the bills when they come in.

On a side note, usually you have about three days from the time a bill arrives and the time it is due, and if you don’t pay on time, you are definitely shut off, no questions asked and no explanations accepted. You were out of town? Tough luck. And if you are late, you can’t pay online or in the bank, like you usually do, but have to go to one or two special offices to deal with it.

The main phone company, called ETB (Empresa Telefonica de Bogota) was, until recently, the only game in town, and therefore horribly abusive to its customers.  They’re still as abusive as they can get away with being, but as there is now competition and public backlash (finally–but that’s another story–how much crap Colombians will put up with before they complain) resulting in some new laws, they’ve cleaned up their act just the tiniest bit. The problem with the competition is, as I said before, the landlord has to decide what phone company is used, so if you’re a tenant, you have to convice the landlord to make the change.

I had long and contentious battles with ETB, which I eventually won, but will give the dirty details in another post. It was my first major lesson, though, in how to survive in a country where logic just doesn’t apply (HINT:  If you just keep insisting, you WILL get your way eventually).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 8th, 2007 at 10:00 pm and is filed under Logic Doesn't Apply, Daily Life in Bogota. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.