PARTICIPANTS HAIL BRISBANE PITA MEET

By Dev Nadkarni

The Pacific Islands Telecom Association’s (PITA) tenth Annual General Meeting, held in Brisbane between April 24 and 28 this year, is being hailed as being one of the most significant events for the region’s telecommunication industry by members and participants alike. “The meeting was well attended by all member nations with most CEO’s or senior engineering management present. It was of the normal high standard of PITA meetings,” says Christchurch-based global cable major General Cable New Zealand’s Business Development Manager, Ben Lee.

From an initial membership of eight telecommunication entities from six Pacific Island nations, PITA has grown to reach current membership of 101, 40 of which are telecommunication carriers and operators from 22 Pacific Island countries, along with 7 independent Regulatory Bodies in the telecommunication industry.

The carriers and operators include international and gateway services, telephone, Internet and mobile service providers and data communications service providers. The other membership categories include suppliers and vendors of telecommunication solutions and services from the developed countries. An apex organization for the telecommunications industry in the region, PITA is a CROP (Council for Regional Organisations in the Pacific) member.

In addition to their isolation, unlike countries in other parts of the world, the small islands and developing states in the Pacific are disadvantaged from the lack in the scale of economy. The Pacific Islands face unique and special challenges for the development of infrastructure. PITA concerns itself with these special circumstances and the issues arising from them that affect the growth and proliferation of telecom and data services in the islands region.

An important part of communications infrastructure in the region is its natural disaster-prone aspect. Quick recovery/ replacement of damaged systems and terrestrial equipment, development of redundancy in networks and human capacity building are very important issues in running the region’s communications infrastructure.

PITA is continually engaged in training of the region’s personnel in state-of-the-art technologies and industry best practice procedures, forming alliances between national telecommunication service providers and global and regional infrastructure companies and working with governments on matters of regulation.

Most telecommunication services providers in the small islands countries are government departments or set-ups that are majority government-owned with regulatory functions, emergency and aviation communication partially or fully delegated to these service providers. Countries with better economies of scale who have not already established an independent regulatory regime are considering plans to do so with a view to opening up the market for competition.

A key issue with competition is on how to address the non-profitable rural communications sector and development, which currently are provided through subsidized services by the telecommunication service providers as a matter of social obligation.

The world today recognises Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) and telecommunications as key enablers for economic and social developments. These form key priorities of PITA. Partnerships have been formed with regional bodies including governments to consolidate efforts for these common goals.

The Brisbane AGM saw presentations and discussions on all these matters and gave wide exposure to the extent that these issues need attention among the participants. Auckland-based company Agile’s Product Manager John Gjaltema says, “The convention is very useful for us, as we get to see from the different Country and industry presentations, what the Telco's require and the unique real issues that these Island Telco's face.”

Allan Stowers, Manager Pacific Islands with ROCPAC, another Auckland-based company, thought these discussions helped his company better prepare for catering to the needs of Pacific islands telcos: “To understand the issues and problems facing our customers in the Pacific and to prepare our organisation as a supplier to adjust to the changes was a useful exercise,” he says.

The ongoing debates on deregulation of the telecommunications industry in various islands presents a fluid picture to observers because of the fast-changing dynamic that is intrinsic to a process as complex as deregulation. “The forum discussion on how each Pacific government is handling deregulation of their respective telecommunication markets was of particular interest to me,” says Lee. “Countries like Tonga had already been through this process a number of years ago, to those who and just starting the process like Fiji. The question of how the social responsibility aspect of providing universal communication service to small isolated populations of island nations was also raised.

"The current status being that many incumbent telco’s are government owned and provide this service as part of a social care element in their current operations in most cases subsided by their current business. In a deregulated world, where they are face-to-face with competitors in their market reducing their revenue streams via competition, how will these social responsibility services to isolated communities going be funded? These question need to be raised with governments considering deregulation and the funding of these schemes.”

Some presentations and discussions such as this one stirred a high standard of debate and showed several possible ways forward for governments. The discussions also brought to the fore the common problems faced by island telcos. “All island countries have similar problems --hence they share their experience and knowledge of how to deal with these issues to help one another which is very useful,” says Stowers.

Agile’s John Gjaltema had some suggestions to make interactions more fruitful at future AGMs. Says Gjaltema: “There need to be more technical 'break out' sessions for technical/ engineering people. While some of the more commercial and regulatory issues are being discussed in the main forum with the commercial people, smaller break out meetings to discuss in more detail technical design/ strategy that these engineering people face every day. What we sometimes see is different things being done in different ways by each area or Countries. I feel that there would be considerable value in getting the different country engineers to work closer together and share experiences and knowledge with each other, as well as with the relevant vendors also attending.”

As the telecommunication industry expands in the region, it is attracting attention
of both infrastructure providers and software solutions companies from all over the world. A case in point is the recent high interest from several global companies that bid for Telecom PNG’s software development and implementation contract. In the coming years, PITA expects this global interest as well as investment in the region only to go up.