The motivation behind the change is that the company is striving to achieve a more transparent communications system. A recipient has to be able to see who is sending them a message. "Fortunately the service was not misused on a large scale," says UTS Marketing and Communications Officer, Ivy Lambert. "The service was intended to allow people to stay in contact even if they were out of credit and thankfully it was used mostly for exactly that purpose."
Anyone who surfs to hepa.an now, will be redirected to the new UTS site: http://www.uts.an/miuts/login. To be able to make use of this service though, one needs to be registered, which is free. The site explains that miUTS is intended to be the central point where customers can make use of various free services of UTS. At this moment these free services include sending up to 100 free SMS messages a day and also being able to check the white pages of the telephone book published by UTS in Curacao. The new feature of the SMS service is that now recipients of the SMS messages will be able to see who the message has been sent by and the recipients contact information will also be saved in the Contact List of the account holder to avoid repeated entry of the same information each time you want to send a message. Upon registration on miUTS there is a chance to win various prizes from UTS and in the near future the miUTS service will be expanded to offer some additional services and new functionalities.
Upon registration some personal information must be submitted, such as the users telephone number, address, id-number, birth date the and first and last name. Once registered you will not be sending anonymous messages, but rather the cell number registered under the user profile will be listed as the 'sender'. Before the recipient would only see the number 9999 which was one of the criticisms of the former Hepa service. Text messages could be sent and one would never be able to identify the sender. This meant that on occasion the service would be used to send threatening messages, spread gossip or to transmit incorrect information. Thanks to the introduction of miUTS and the integration of Hepa into the account profile that will no longer be possible. miUTS will be available for all customers in UTS territories: St. Maarten, Saint Martin, Saba, St. Eustatius, St. Kitts, Nevis, Curacao, Bonaire and Surinam.
