"We need collective political will to cooperate on the communication challenges that we all share in this region.”

By Dev Nadkarni

Vinton Cerf... access to broadband and internet a major challenge. Picture: Dev Nadkarni

Widely regarded as the inventor of the Internet, Dr Vinton Cerf’s new role is that of Chief Internet Evangelist with Google. Cerf is also the chairman of ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) and was in Wellington to attend its global meeting. He also addressed the Pacific Islands Forum ICT ministers meeting and mingled with officials, leaders and ministers speaking with them, answering questions and posing for pictures. Cerf visited Kiribati last year to attend the Pacific Islands Internet Society Chapter’s (PICISOC) annual meeting and briefly stopped over in Fiji. “Flying over the Pacific, I realized how much water there is in this part of the world,” he says. He seems to have fallen in love with the region, promising to attend PICISOC’s meeting in Samoa, later this year. He empathizes with the region’s multiple environmental, logistic and economic challenges and, in this interview with ISLANDS BUSINESS' Dev Nadkarni, puts forth his considered views on what the region needs to do in the ICT arena.

What struck you most about your interaction with communications and IT ministers from the Pacific islands in Wellington?

First I was very pleased that they were meeting together to discuss issues of common interest. The Pacific Islands share many things in common including a serious need for broadband access to Internet for purposes of facilitating the entry of their economies into global markets.

You’ve been in the Pacific islands last year and will visit again later this year. What are the Pacific islands’ greatest challenges?

First, I must say that the most severe threat is global warming and potentially rising sea levels that threaten coastal populations and even entire islands (I think of Kiribati especially here). Second, access to broadband communication and to the Internet is a major challenge for most of the islands in the Pacific. There is no question that cooperation among the Pacific countries could make a big difference. The third challenge is finding ways to open their economies to global participation. Local economies are often relatively small and cannot support a full range of ICT products and services based purely on the local markets. So these businesses must have a way to reach much larger markets through the Internet. The other challenges are to increase educational levels of the workforce so that ICT is a realistic area in which to focus, and attracting capital investment in support of local businesses.

A region as isolated as the Pacific Islands needs greater, cheaper and (preferably) wireless accessibility to information and communication with one another and the rest of the world. Though governments may be willing to go along with requisite legislation and deregulation, it would still make little commercial sense to provide state-of-art services to such a thinly spread out population with little economic muscle. What’s the way out?

Wireless local services (WiMax, Wi-Fi) can help. Some communities are building their own infrastructure and treating it somewhat like the road system --a common good. Satellite is the only way to link the islands (there are some opportunities for undersea cable but not all islands can participate in that). I continue to believe that shared, high speed, packet switched satellite service could be a powerful addition to the telecommunications arsenal.

What needs to be done?

I would like to see a parallel technology and policy initiative to design a shared satellite system and to look for a business model that permits all participating countries to bear reasonable fractions of the cost. I think wireless local distribution is very attractive (low capital costs). VSAT for inter-island traffic --and shared, multi-access packet satellite for wide area coverage. A big issue is maintenance of these systems --trained personnel are needed. It is a potential opportunity for local development.

How may the Pacific islands make use of your good offices as Chief Internet Evangelist of Internet’s most admired company?

I hope I can provide some stimulus for multi-lateral planning and thinking. The PICISOC is one potential catalyst in this discussion. We need collective political will to cooperate on the communication challenges that we all share in this region.