Telecom
Satellite Direct to Where?
Isolated Home of Exiled Bikinians Soon to Be Connected.
The Marshall Islands country code — 692 — will soon no longer be limited to the urban centers of Majuro and Ebeye. The National Telecommunications Authority (NTA) is planning to establish its first earth station for satellite communications on an outer island in the coming year. The beneficiaries of this unprecedented service will be Bikini Islanders whose home in exile, Kili Island, has been among the most isolated and difficult to reach in this watery nation of low coral islands. By the end of 2002, residents of Kili — a one-third of a square mile island — will be dialing their relatives in the U.S. direct, and tapping out messages via Internet chat rooms.
For more than 30 years after their resettlement there in 1948 to make way for 23 U.S. nuclear tests at Bikini, islanders treated Kili as a temporary home. But since the late-1980s, greater investments have gone into improving housing, building a power plant and a variety of other community facilities. Opening of international telephone service will mark a near total transformation of a place that islanders once called the “prison island” because of difficulties getting food — or any other kind of — deliveries to the island that has no protected anchorage.
- ADVERTISEMENT -
NTA General Manager Alan Fowler said that phone company is extending service initially to Kili, with an eye to other possible remote outer atolls that may also be economically feasible. Fowler said NTA is funding the establishment of the Kili earth station with its own money. The Marshall Islands government has begun discussions with NTA about establishing similar earth stations on the outer atolls of Jaluit, Wotje and Enewetak. The U.S. government gives the Marshall Islands $300,000 annually for telecommunications development, and this year the Marshall Islands is planning to spend $500,000 on improving outer island communications systems, according to Transportation and Communications Minister Brenson Wase.
Kili was selected as the initial outer island for satellite communications because its population of about 1,000 is wealthy by outer island standards — the Bikinians receive regular compensation payments from a US-funded nuclear test trust fund — and it has a power plant to supply electricity for the service. The four atolls suggested all have a significant source of income — Kili and Enewetak from nuclear resettlement trust funds; Jaluit and Wotje as sub-district centers with government high schools and businesses — and independent power supplies.
