Forum’s Digital Strategy Forges Ahead

By Dev Nadkarni

‘Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) for every Pacific Islander’. That, very simply, is the ultimate goal of the Pacific Islands Digital Strategy --an important part of the Pacific Plan.

Pacific Islands communications and ICT ministers in Wellington

The route to achieving this egalitarian goal, though, is far from simple. The choice of appropriate technologies; the complexities and costs of implementing them given the Pacific Islands’ unique geographic, topographic and demographic attributes; their critical implications on existing regulatory regimes and business models --all conspire to make the digital strategy a work in progress for some time to come. “The scale of investment and complexities make the task immense but we must try,” says Pacific Islands Forum Secretary General, Greg Urwin.

However, the Forum Countries’ ICT ministers’ March meeting in Wellington showed that ICT is at the top of their development agendas. “It was very apparent that there was a high level of engagement and enthusiasm on the part of all the Forum countries,” says New Zealand’s minister for Information Technology and Telecommunications David Cunliffe, in an interview with Islands Business. “There was an excellent turn out of responsible Ministers and a good engagement all round in the discussions. It was especially welcome to hear some Ministers expressing the hope and intention of building on the experience of other Islands governments in finding a way forward for their own advancement.” Cunliffe chaired the ministerial meeting.

This was not the first meeting of its kind. Ministers responsible for communications had requested work on several issues including data collection, Internet governance, and policy and regulatory framework developments when they last met in April 2002. The idea was to evolve ways and means to speed up implementation of ICTs across the region, leveraging every sector of the economy. Progress on many of these issues and the problems faced by individual countries while implementing them were addressed at the Wellington meeting.

Structured as a two-day meet, officials of the Forum Secretariat, Forum member countries’ communications departments, CROP (Council of Regional Organizations of the Pacific) organizations and NGOs among others participated in the deliberations on the first day. They concluded with a document containing a report on their meeting that discussed the progress of ICT in the region and suggesting the next steps to the Forum countries’ ministers of communication who met on day two.

The ministers then considered these proposals and drafted the “Wellington Declaration”, a document that suggests ways and means to progressively implement ICTs in the region for the consideration of the leaders of Forum Island Countries when they convene for their annual meet later this year in Tonga.

ICT expert Don Hollander, set the tome for the conference with his keynote address. Hollander, who has also lived and worked in the Pacific islands urged leaders to take steps to implement ICTs that are more easily available now than ever before. He illustrated his presentation titled “A day in the life of an ICT-enabled pacific island village”, with scenarios of how life could be transformed with the implementation of ICTs even in the remotest Pacific villages.

He planted various ICT goodies, now available routinely in the developed world, on to the Pacific islands environment, giving a snapshot of what life can be like with ICT. He touched on all aspects of islands life including farming, fishing, education, business and even religion, factoring in the realities of life in the islands.

His message to the government stakeholders of ICT was that technology is all there for the asking –it is up to islands leaders to cooperate and feel committed enough to implement ICTs to better the lifestyles of their people. Internet inventor and ICANN chairman Dr Vinton Cerf, who addressed the ministers on the second day, echoed these sentiments.

Hollander, who has been chief information officer with several organizations and heads a trust dedicated to spreading IT was instrumental in organizing the Pasifika IT Day that showcased successful IT projects by islanders, in the islands as well as in New Zealand in a daylong schedule of presentations.

Discussions at the meeting of officials --efficiently moderated by Forum Deputy Secretary General Peter Forau and ICT domain expert John Budden-- brought to attention a number of similar problems between individual islands and threw up potential solutions for consideration often in the course of the same session. A case in point is the regional roaming issue in the cellular phone industry. The Cook Islands said it took 15 months to implement roaming, thanks to a number of issues.

The discussion threw light on the fact that the main issues that had to be dealt with were more of a commercial nature than regulatory. Australia said it had made available funding to the tune of A$350,000 to conduct studies on the issue of roaming in the islands --a thing which seemed to be news to most participants. Samoa offered to work in terms of a ‘clearing house’ approach for the Pacific Islands since individually these countries will find it difficult to justify the costs of roaming.

Australia and New Zealand, both ahead in ICT implementation in their respective countries when compared to the islands, offered to assist in helping establish a blueprint for a regional regulatory framework. (New Zealand is appreciative of the regulatory problems that the islands face thanks to its own problems with a monolithic telecom operator that is widely seen as a stumbling block in the quicker spread of broadband in the country. NZ is concerned at its low ranking in broadband uptake in the list of OECD countries. Cunliffe briefly referred to these problems in the course of one of the sessions that he was chairing).

The two countries also assured cooperation in exploring the potential for cooperation in infrastructure, market development, and the establishment of a public-private body called the Pacific Council for Digital Future.

CROP organisations’ contribution

CROP organizations put up presentations that demonstrated just how much effect ICTs have on so many aspects of people’s lives everywhere: health, education, disaster management, business and economy –to name only a few.

The Noumea, New Caledonia-based South Pacific Commission (SPC) presentation illustrated how ICTs had helped in spreading awareness of communicable and non-communicable diseases in recent times. One slide showed peaks in messages posted on a website after a disease outbreak in the region –this initiated much discussion among affected people and informed one another of remedial mesaures. It also showcased a similar ICT-related disease-control project in Yap that has been implemented with good success.

The South Pacific Applied Geoscience Commission (SOPAC) talked about its goal of “mainstreaming ICT” in all of their activities. “Water, Energy and ICT” is their slogan, it was revealed. SOPAC has been at the forefront of planning and implementation of a number of projects related to e-government, telecentres, disaster forecasting and management, remote sensing and the well-known map server project, which now covers eight Pacific Islands countries.

The University of the South Pacific (USP) is one of the region’s early ICT implementers having had an ongoing satellite-based regional instruction programme for decades now. The satellite network was upgraded in 2004 to support the Internet Protocol (IP) platform and just last year, after long negotiations, it was hooked up to a high-speed Australian Universities network called AARNET that brought broadband in the real sense (155M) to its 18,000-odd students who had to make do with a paltry 1M for years.

USP hopes that it will now be able to share this bandwidth bonanza with other educational institutions in Fiji, should it receive the requisite clearances. “Governments must provide communication licences to non-telecomm industry players, such as NGOs working for education or health. A good example of this is PFNet in the Solomon Islands,” says Suva-based Osamu Makino, Project Formulation Adviser with the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), the largest education sector ICT donor in the region. (A JICA-funded F$30m ICT centre has been on the cards for some time now).

USP now is also the nodal agency for Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) Technologies in the region and hopes to build capacity throughout the islands for development of Open Source-based software and applications for a number of end uses. Other developments at USP: a new IT Park which already has four industries and its own enterprise, Stepstone Pacific, which serves as its commercial arm sourcing IT projects in the region and beyond.

USP, thanks to its long experience in ICT implementation and its ready infrastructure in being able to build human capacity, would be a natural choice as a driver of ICT in the region. Says Makino: “Enhance and expand USP's role as a leading centre in fostering and developing information and professional networking, research and partnerships in the region and with academic and research institutions all over the world.”

Pacific Islands Telecom Association (PITA), cited economies of scale as the main barrier. Building backbone redundancy is crucial as the satellite failure last year amply demonstrated. Submarine cables are an alternative and some nations are already considering it but smaller nations may be left out simply because of the high capital costs.

A more attractive alternative would be sharing additional satellite capacity with pooled resources. Not that this is unprecedented. Cook Islands Telecom and French Polynesia’s OPT worked together recently inking a deal to share satellite capacity. “The negotiation came about due to the good relationship between OPT and Telecom Cook Islands Ltd. OPT had some spare capacity and Telecom Cook Islands in discussions with OPT, negotiated to buy it at a small mark up from the cost price to OPT,” explains Stuart Davies CEO, Cook Islands Telecom. “The result was huge savings for Telecom Cook Islands Ltd. And OPT got revenue that they otherwise would not have had. It was a real life story where due to the networking provided by PITA, a win-win situation came about.” Cook Islands Telecom passed on 50 per cent of the savings thus accrued to its users, thereby effecting lower international call rates.

Satellite technology is emerging to be the technology of choice for the regional backbone. “Satellite services are becoming readily available and if a means of sharing the cost of ground stations can be found, the price of connectivity for individuals or villages and businesses can be reduced,” says Cunliffe. “Since satellite cost is getting down, Internet connectivity using satellites would be first option soon,” remarks JICA’s Makino.

Creating solutions

All participating countries presented their own country reports outlining the progress they have been making in terms of rolling out deregulation plans; introducing competition; achieving greater teledensities; setting up telecentres in remote locations; employing hybrid, sometimes homegrown technologies to overcome problems peculiar to a particular environment or circumstance. They also highlighted the problems they faced.

Tonga’s achievements have been impressive: Tariffs for almost all communications services have dropped significantly by more than 200 per cent. Overseas calls, which were US$1.50/minute prior to competition, are now only 35 cents a minute. Teledensity has increased from 8 to 44 per cent.

The reports showed that many of the countries were finding ways and means to get on with their projects working around regulatory and infrastructural limitations. Commerce, creativity and a spirit of cooperation is often the overriding factor. Tonga’s telecom is hooking up by satellite with Fiji’s Fintel in gaining access to the Southern Cross Cable, which touches Suva but not Tonga.

Similarly, Kiribati with SOPAC’s help successfully transmits FM radio programming (normally, with a radial range of a few dozen kilometres) to its remote islands hundreds (even thousands) of kilometres away by using Internet technologies. Programming from one centre is sent as a file using the Internet. The file is received on another island, converted and broadcast through a low-power FM transmitter, with people tuning in with their normal radio sets.

The Solomon Islands’ PfNet project has been widely noted as one of the region’s most successful ICT project implementations. As part of the project telecentres and email centres have been progressively set up across remote locations in the Solomons, often at places where there is no reliable power supply. Solomon Islands was among the countries that unfortunately went unrepresented at the ministerial meeting (unavailability of suitable flight connections was cited as a reason for the absence).

Niue is said to have implemented wireless Internet connectivity throughout its main island using coconut trees and solar panels to power transmitters. A pamphlet circulated during the meeting outlined how the tiny atoll nation became the first in the world to offer ‘wifi’ connectivity to all its citizens.

Positive outcomes

One of the most significant outcomes of the ministerial meeting was the formation of a taskforce drawn from organizations and governments region-wide. “The Task Force with specific terms of reference and objectives is a very good outcome from NZ’s point of view,” says Cunliffe.

“Fully recognizing the unprecedented potential of ICT as a tool to boost the economic and social developments,” was important for Paula M’au, Deputy Secretary with the office of Tonga’s Prime Minister. Ma’u has been elected chairperson of the taskforce. He was delighted that Tonga had the chance to drive the taskforce.

“The recognition of necessities for Policy reform of the ICT sector, rural communication, introduction of IP technology, developing human resources for the new technology, and ICT application for education and health sectors by the ministers was an important outcome,” says Makino.

Building capacity both in terms of technology and regulation is urgent. Both Australia and New Zealand have assured help in this regard. Almost all islands started out with telecoms within governments. Over time, many countries separated telcos as separate bodies. Then some started competition to give a better deal to consumers. Some countries have progressed faster than others. For, getting long-established monopolistic service providers to loosen up and give up what they have been used to perceive as their own fiefdoms is no easy task as even New Zealand has come to realize.

There is sufficient understanding about the maze of issues involved in the ICT sphere among certain sections of the stakeholder spectrum. There needs to be a mechanism to involve those groups of stakeholders –especially rural communities, common end users, the general public—in the consultative process. In a word, ICT needs to be adequately demystified and its issues clearly conveyed to all stakeholders. Capacity building in the media sector –mainly concerning reporting on these issues—needs to be given equal priority.

For, only when people are empowered with information and a greater understanding of underlying issues can they bring about the sense of urgency among elected representatives that is required in clearing the regulatory and legislative hurdles for quicker implementation of ICTs.

As both the ICANN event and the ministerial meeting demonstrated, technologies exist and economies of scale can be achieved. But ultimately the speed with which ICT proliferates in the region will depend a lot on the leaders’ individual and collective political will and vision.

The essence of what needs to be done is contained in the “Wellington Document”. It will be up to the leaders, when they meet later this year, to endorse and convert it into a meaningful action plan that will bring the multiple benefits of ICT to every Pacific islander in the near future.