Efforts are underway to explore this possibility, says Maui Sanford, president of the Pacific Islands Telecommunications Association (PITA).
PITA President Maui Sanford. Picture: Dev Nadkarni
In an interview with ISLANDS BUSINESS, Maui says the need for cooperation on this matter is urgent in light of changes that are now being forced upon islands telecom operators as a result of the Internet revolution.
“It has always been a major challenge for us to develop and provide access to information to our islands communities,” says Sanford.
“Most of the islands in the Pacific have majority of their population located in the rural areas so they are not connected to the information world as a lot of effort is put into developing the urban communities and cities.
“So we have realised, by working closely through PITA that a major issue for us is the development of our communications infrastructure with satellite costs being the main issue.
“If we deal separately with satellite operators, our costs are high because we each buy a small amount of satellite capacity.”
The convergence of voice, data and video over the Internet and the explosion of mobile telephony in the region has meant that there is more and more need for bandwidth, either from satellite or from fibre optic cables.
While fibre optic cables become a cheaper option when the need for capacity builds up, many islands in the region will always find connection via satellite to be a more sensible choice either because their terrain is too rugged or the islands in their archipelagos are too scattered.
Putting in cable through these areas, often uneconomical and sparsely populated, would not be a commercially sensible choice.
Even for the more developed countries in the region like Papua Guinea and Fiji, delivering services to some parts of the country has to be done via satellite.
Aggregating the needs is therefore the next logical move for these operators, most of whom are obligated to extend their services to the rural areas even though it is uneconomical and often an unprofitable exercise.
Sanford says a meeting in February in French Polynesia between the PITA working group and some of the satellite operators had revolved around the discussion of “the possibility of having one satellite in the region”.
“The idea is to aggregate needs and get not just better pricing but also make sure that we have enough available capacity in the region. It is hard to say at this stage what the demand in the region is.
“But we are undertaking an exercise to try to quantify the current and future needs,” he says.
“But we do know that due to Internet, the bandwidth need for the region is getting bigger and bigger for each country and this need is growing fast.”
Another big challenge associated with the telecommunications business in the region is the fact that most countries are classified as least developed countries so connecting their population is an even bigger and tricky task.
At some point, they would have to call for some form of funding intervention from the outside world.
Sanford believes the best way to help less developed nations is for telecom companies in all Pacific islands countries to come together as one and form one voice and act as a negotiation bloc for telecommunication needs of the Pacific, whether it be satellite space, telecom equipment or necessary services and training.
This power bloc, he says, would be more effective rather than each country trying to negotiate with the suppliers for its needs. It would also be a more effective way to lobby for funding from international organisations that have programmes for developing ICT in the region.
“This way, we could really have a project which is trans-national and together we could present a reasonable and decent proposal to major donor organisations which will reduce our costs and I am sure they (donor agencies) would be willing to support this kind of project,” Sanford says.
All these plans are still embryonic at this point. If the plan to aggregate does go ahead and the needs of the Pacific have been quantified and the support of donor agencies secured, there would then be the issue of having to negotiate with satellite companies for the Pacific bloc to buy rather than lease space off the satellites.
Donor agencies, says Sanford, are only likely to provide funding for capital investment, so leasing satellite capacity will be out of the picture.
If this is achieved, then training needs arise for the management of earth stations and other equipment.
This scenario repeats itself throughout the Pacific, so converging it all into one united body would be a huge cost savings exercise and will allow telecom companies to better serve their rural communities and help avoid a two-speed evolution of the population where one section is connected to the information world and the other not connected, says Sanford.
More discussion will be done on this at PITA’s annual general meeting this month.
Another important issue that PITA is focusing on is communications solution when natural disasters strike.
“Most of us have to face a natural disasters, whether it be hurricane or cyclone. In regards to this, PITA has set up a group to work on providing solutions for the Pacific islands on how to respond to these events. It is not active yet. We are a little late on that,” says Sanford.
“For now, we are recommending that countries invest in spare antennas just in case the main one goes down.
“Communication solution, in case of natural disasters, is another important area that needs to be addressed because when the main antenna goes down, the entire population is cut off from the rest of the world.”
