‘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.
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 sometime to come.
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.
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.
Officials of the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat, Forum member countries’ communications departments, CROP (Council of Regional Organisations of the Pacific) and NGOs participated in the deliberations on the first day of the two-day meet. They concluded with a report on the progress of regional ICT and suggested the next steps to the Forum countries’ communication ministers who met on day two.
The ministers considered these proposals and drafted the “Wellington Declaration”, that suggests ways to progressively implement ICTs in the region for the consideration of Forum Islands Countries’ leaders when they convene for their annual meet later this year in Tonga.
Discussions at the meeting brought to attention a number of similar problems and threw up potential solutions.
A case in point is the regional roaming issue in the cellular phone industry. The discussion pointed out that the main issues were more of a commercial nature than regulatory. Australia said it had made available A$350,000 to conduct studies on roaming issues. Samoa offered to work as a ‘clearing house’ for the Pacific Islands, since individually they would find it difficult to justify costs.
Australia and New Zealand offered to assist in establishing a blueprint for a regional regulatory framework and exploring the potential for cooperation in infrastructure, market development and forming a public-private body, the Pacific Council for Digital Future (PCDF).
CROP’s contribution
CROP organisations put up presentations that demonstrated the effect ICTs have on health, education, disaster management, business and economy in the region.
The Noumea-based South Pacific Commission (SPC) showcased how ICT had helped spread awareness of diseases. One slide showed peaks in messages posted on a website after a disease outbreak—this initiated discussions among affected people and informed one another of remedial measures.
The South Pacific Applied Geoscience Commission (SOPAC) talked about its goal of “mainstreaming ICT” in all their activities.
“Water, Energy and ICT” is their slogan. SOPAC has been at the forefront of planning and implementing 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 implementors having had an ongoing satellite-based regional instruction programme for decades.
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 it will now be able to share this bandwidth bonanza with other educational institutions in Fiji, should it receive the required clearances.
“Governments must provide communication licences to non-telecom 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$30 million 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 the 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, owing 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. Cook Islands Telecom and French Polynesia’s OPT worked together recently inking a satellite capacity sharing deal.
“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, Cook Islands Telecom chief executive.
“The result was a huge saving for Telecom Cook Islands. And OPT also got revenue that they otherwise would not have had. It was a real life win-win situation.”
Cook Islands Telecom passed on 50 percent of the savings thus accrued to its users, thereby effecting lower international call rates.
Satellite technology is emerging as 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
Participating countries presented reports outlining their progress in 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.
Tonga’s achievements are impressive: Tariffs for almost all communications services have dropped significantly by more than 200 percent. 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 percent.
The reports showed many countries were finding ways to get on with their projects working around regulatory and infrastructural limitations.
Commerce, creativity and a spirit of cooperation are often the driving 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 thousands of kilometres away by using Internet technologies.
Programming 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.
Telecentres and email centres have been progressively set up across remote locations in the Solomons, often at places without power supply.
A pamphlet circulated during the meeting outlined how the tiny atoll Niue became the first in the world to offer ‘wifi’ (wireless) connectivity to all its citizens.
Autor/Author: Dev Nadkarni
Quelle/Source: Islands Business, 01.06.2006
