Telecom
Fiji's Broadband Future
What the Southern Cross Cable can offer.
At the click of a switch in November, Fiji truly entered the Internet Age. That’s when the Southern Cross Cable Cable (www.southerncrosscable.com) , a fiber optic cable stretching from Australia and New Zealand to the U.S. mainland via Fiji and Hawaii, began officially carrying data traffic. The Southern Cross Cable’s massive carrying capacity is the equivalent of using a huge pipe instead of a garden hose to carry information across the Pacific.
The submarine cable, developed with Telecom New Zealand as a leading partner, allows Fiji’s international telecom provider, Fiji International Telecommunications, Ltd., or FINTEL, to offer for the first time broadband data services. And that means a host of economic opportunities for Fiji where none existed before.
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Says FINTEL General Manager Philip J. Richards: "This will enable activities such as call-centers, data processing zones, tele-medicine and other tele-services to be available in Fiji via this cable. We will connect our service to Australia, New Zealand and United States—our three main termination points for telecommunications here in Fiji. It opens up a huge range of opportunities such as multimedia and cable TV and offers secure, high-speed service."
The current trans-Pacific communication cables—ANZCAN and PACRIM—have reached their capacity. ANZCAN, an analog system cable, which runs between Canada, Fiji, and New Zealand, was laid out in the mid-1980s.
Richards notes that the Southern Cross was subsequently developed to supplement that capacity. Southern Cross Cable ownership is distributed among cable developers: Telecom New Zealand, which owns 50 percent; Cable & Wireless Optus, 40 percent; and, MCI WorldCom, 10 percent. The fiber optic cable, some 30,000 kilometers long, would give sufficient capacity for the next 10 to 15 years, although the cable operators warn that it could all be spoken for in as soon as two to three years.
Richards explains that when the cable project was first proposed about three years ago, Fiji was excluded in the discussions to establish landing due to costs. "We've had cables in Fiji since the early 1900s," says Richards. "Now Fiji has two complimentary transmission parts from Fiji—one via satellite and the other via cable. Fiji's the only South Pacific country that has both.
The Southern Cross Cable project cost approximately $US1.2 billion, which includes FINTEL's investment of some $US30 million.
Does Fiji have enough technology to take advantage of the cable’s massive capacity? Richards says there is a need to find new services. The capacity quantity exceeds what is presently needed. The amount of capacity increases incrementally, but businesses need to be developed to utilize the capacity.
FINTEL's Deputy General Manager Timoci Ledua says that at the moment, lack of bandwidth isn't an issue for Fiji's Internet services because the country cannot utilize the quantity SCC provides. "Existing businesses," Ledua says, "use very little. The whole of communication from Fiji to the rest of the world, we're talking maximum 40 Mbit/s. Due to the huge bandwidth we have we really need to look outside Fiji to try and market this because I cannot possibly see Fiji utilizing that bandwidth in two or three years time.”
Fiji is not the only Pacific Island country undergoing telecommunication changes. Expect some major changes to Norfolk Island’s telecommunications structure over the next 12 months. Tenders were to have been awarded in December for the carriage of international communications.
