20% of the world’s online

Dionisia Tabureguci
Vint Cerf, widely referred to as the “Father of the Internet” in the global ICT world, has urged Pacific islanders to seize opportunities offered by the Internet and also called on Pacific islands administrations to cooperate in an effort to try to create widely accessible Internet in the region.

“Nothing could be more important than talking about the Internet in the Pacific Islands region,” said the now Google Chief Evangelist and former MCI strategist.

“It has become part of the world’s economy. Twenty percent of the world is online. The variations in the Pacific islands are wide. Some islands have very high penetrations, some have less. But nothing is more important than getting all of the islands’ populations online and able to access this remarkable global resource.

“Part of the reason for that is that the Internet enables a global economy. It allows a local island economy to reach out and take advantage of regions of the world where Internet is already actively in use and heavily penetrated.”

Cerf’s message was posted on YouTube last month as an early virtual speech, ahead of September’s week-long PacINET conference scheduled for Cook Islands and organised annually by the Pacific Islands Chapter of the Internet Society (PICISOC).

Having attended two PacINETs—in 2005 and 2006—and met key figures in Pacific governments and telecommunication industries, Cerf is very aware of the challenges countries in the region face in their effort to make Internet available to their population.

With submarine communication cables being a scarce resource and only available to a few islands countries, most link their population to the outside world through satellites, an option that is known to be far more costly than cables.

When Cerf came to the Pacific in 2005, his first time here, he suggested and popularised the idea of bandwidth aggregation.

This has emerged in two forms: a bandwidth aggregation project in an advanced stage being handled by the Pacific Islands Telecommunication Association (PITA) for its Pacific telecom members; and an Australian-funded Pacific Rural Connectivity Project (RICS), which comes under the joint supervision of the Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC) and the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat (PIFS).

RICS, still in a pilot stage, was among projects discussed by the Pacific Islands Forum leaders when they met in Tonga last year.

It aims to take Internet to rural Pacific and bridge the digital divide while the PITA project aims to ease the cost burden on PITA members by pooling their bandwidth needs and having it supplied from one satellite source. 

Cerf, who is Google’s chief Internet evangelist and now considered a “Friend of the Pacific”, again emphasised aggregation as the way to go for the Pacific.

“Something which I have been very concerned about over the last several years is that access to Internet is such a huge challenge in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

“For one thing, we don’t have cable landings in every place where they could be used effectively. We’re forced to make use of satellite communication instead. This is not inexpensive. And it has been part of my belief that a collaboration among the islands administration to make bulk purchases of that access to satellite capacity with landing points at various islands could in fact be very beneficial.

“I hope there will be an opportunity to pursue that course of action as part of PacINET 2008 discussions on the use of Internet in the islands,” he said.

As liberalisation and open competition begin in the Pacific’s major telecom markets and Internet access is slowly nudged into Pacific societies, there are limitless opportunities.

“You can create opportunities for income to the islands for example, by doing work that’s delivered through the network to other parties that need it.

“Examples of this have shown up in other parts of the world like Ireland and India, where there’s an intense amount of information technology activity that is delivered through the Internet to the parties eager to pay for these services and products.

“If it were possible to have everyone online in this region, I believe it would make a big difference to people’s ability to preserve culture, to share what’s available in terms of tourism, and to offer to the rest of the world glimpses of what life is like in this part of the world. Internet is one way in which that particular activity can be accomplished. But it only works if people have access to it,” Cerf added.

PICISOC acting chair Franck Martin said this year’s PacINET is expected to draw a wide range of parties with one common interest—the development of Internet in the Pacific.

Speakers include Jim Marurai, Prime Minister of the Cook Islands; Professor Howard A. Schmidt, Security Strategist and former White House Cyber Security Advisor; Dr Jimmie Rodgers, Director-General of the Secretariat of the Pacific Community; Bashka Rao, Deputy Director South Pacific Applied GeoScience Commission; and John Crain, Chief Technology Officer of ICANN (International Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers). ICANN, first chaired by Cerf, is the governing body for all Internet domain names in the world.