No doubt Internet access and bandwidth availability are key requirements to ensure superior quality communication in this day and age. Take an enterprise for example, who is using an IP telephony network to link up its offices in a few Pacific islands countries. There is nothing more important than having a reliable data connection and enough bandwidth to allow this technology to do its work properly and facilitate business for this enterprise.
 
It’s really the only way that a business could maximise the use of new applications, says Agile (NZ) Ltd’s account manager John Gjaltema, in an interview with ISLANDS BUSINESS. 

The company has been involved in the Pacific region for over 20 years and based on its partnerships with leading suppliers like Avaya, RAD, OKI, NICE, Tandberg, Sony and Microsoft, it has helped telecom companies and enterprises in the region with a wide range of solutions from linking islands with satellite link optimisation to providing infrastructure for some of the largest contact centres. 

Agile NZ recently put in place an Avaya IP telephony network for a bank in the Pacific to service this bank’s 45 different branches and offices in seven different island nations.

Once the inter-office bandwidth is in place, the IP telephony network will allow these branches to communicate with each other as if they are in one location, said Gjaltema.

The obvious advantages for the business, he said, are improved communications, better business efficiencies and greatly improved customer service.

That’s quite an achievement for technology but for this kind of innovation to really work, technology alone cannot do the job.

“All these new applications are fantastic, they work really well but you need that bandwidth, you need that access,” said Gjaltema. Unfortunately - with the exception of Fiji because you have fibre going in there - a lot of other islands nations like Samoa, Tonga and Cooks only have satellites and they are limited by their satellite bandwidth.

"So the situation is that we have all these applications available and they offer really great connectivity tools for business as well as allowing people to work separately and farther apart but we need that access.”

An IP telephony network for instance, cannot work unless there is Internet and sufficient bandwidth, said Gjaltema.

He said it was good to see that more and more Pacific islanders are now using telephones to call their relatives and friends, when previously, they only did so when it was very necessary as communication costs were so high.
New technologies brought into the Pacific by companies like Agile played a big part in that cost reduction.

“One of the areas that we do a lot of work in is in satellite because a lot of communication in all the Pacific islands that we work in come in by the satellite,” Gjaltema said. The satellite is an expensive way for services to come in to these islands and it limits things like broadband and Internet access, etc. We have been involved in putting in equipment that actually optimises the circuits on these satellite links.

This will allow islands telcos to get more capacity on those satellite links, which has meant a recent drop in the cost of international toll costs.

“What this has meant is that more and more Pacific islanders are now using telephones to call their relatives and friends overseas on a more social basis rather than previously, where they tended to only call when necessary or in emergencies due to the high toll costs.

“Added to this is the increased penetration of the Internet, which removes some of the remoteness of the Pacific islands,” Gjaltema said.

“In fact, all of the voice and data circuits going in and out of many islands over the satellite links are now running on equipment that Agile has supplied.”

In all its projects in the Pacific, Agile NZ is closely involved in the specification, design and implementation and ongoing support of these networks through its local partners.

In other areas of its service, Agile NZ is also involved in the Enterprise and Small Business market, supplying it with a range of IP telephony and VoIP solutions either in conjunction with local telcos or working with local re-sellers.