Cover Story
Global Broadband, Regional Divides
This Month’s Telecom Meetings In Honolulu Take Up The Pacific’s Digital Challenges
Hoyt Zia, the executive director of the Pacific Telecommunications Council has been busy preparing for his organization’s 25th-annual conference, this year known as PTC2003. Held every year in Hawaii, it’s become the place to be seen—and to see— what’s new in the telecom industry worldwide. “Hawaii’s ideal,” Zia says, “because a lot of people in the mainland U.S. and other cold places find the idea of sunshine in January very appealing.”
It’s not all sun and sand though. The event has become a techno-telecom-policy summit of sorts. This year’s conference bills its first day as “The Asia Satellite Communications Summit.” There are other events clustered around PTC2003 too, like the Pacific Islands Telecommunications Association meeting the day before the PTC opens on January 19. There’s also a Pacific Telehealth Seminar, a Pan Pacific Distance Learning Association Conference and a China Telecom 2003 seminar—all happening within or around PTC2003.
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Zia says the scope of what’s come under the umbrella word “telecom’ has become truly enormous because it refers to the whole infrastructure of the information age. “We include land-line phone service, wireless, satellite television, Internet services and undersea fiber optic cable. It’s a huge field and it’s hard to keep up with everything.”
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So what is happening?
“The merging of wireless and entertainment is one of the big themes and, of course, broadband and the digital divide,” Zia says. In the Pacific, for instance, Tonga has only 1 percent of its population with access to the Internet.
And what trends are unique in the Islands?
“There’s always going to be limited growth because of the population sizes on smaller islands,” Zia says. “So the big trend for small places is satellite delivery—of almost all digital media, including the Internet, phone service and television. The economics of scale make heavy investments like running cable not very appealing for any developing country.” Zia sees things like video streaming and movies on demand being delivered wirelessly to customers from satellite ground stations. The other regional trend he notes is the preponderance of national phone services run by the governments—a reality in most developing countries.
Dan Wedemeyer, a University of Hawaii professor of communications, will also be participating in PTC2003. He specializes in projecting telecom trends and forecasting future needs in the field. Looking at the situation of the Pacific Islands, Wedemeyer second’s Zia point about population base. “One of the reasons people at conferences like this don’t focus on the Pacific Islands is because populations equal markets.” And the markets in the region often don’t justify private sector investment. “Another issue that concerns me is human resources. Basic communications technology literacy is a real problem in the region. When people get skills, they often leave the Islands. And when they leave, they often don’t come back. We have a digital divide in that all the places in the region are remote, but there’s also the divide between the population centers and the outer islands. But in the Pacific, even if you’re in a population center, the access speeds may only be 28.8 kbps at the most, so access speeds are also an issue.” Universal access is a long way away for many areas of the Pacific.
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In addition to the digital divide, that is, the disparity between the haves and the have-nots of technology, there are other social policy issues in telecom. “After the technology and the policy issues, there are a lot of content issues, like ‘cultural imperialism,’” Zia adds. This most often refers to the American domination of both the technology and the content of entertainment media and the English language domination of the Internet. “Now there are also more and more issues about privacy and security,” Zia says. “Telecom rates are an issue too. The U.S. often can call the shots in pricing and countries like Australia have been quite vocal about wanting more of a say in setting telecom rates.”
In terms of technology, Zia thinks WiFi (from the phrase “Wireless Fidelity”) is the big thing these days. WiFi refers to the engineering standard that is involved in the low-frequency wireless connections that allow certain areas to be wirelessly connected to the Internet or other telecom services. For instance, if you stayed in a WiFi-equipped hotel, your laptop could retrieve your email or let you search the net without even plugging in a wire—and you could do this from any location in the hotel. The technology is already in some homes and offices.
Zia expects about 1,500 participants at PTC2003. In 2000 and 2001, the conference had up to 1,800 registered attendees.
For the Pacific Islands, perhaps the over-arching issue is the economic viability of telecommunications services in small places. The Islands Association, in addition to hosting it’s own meeting before the PTC2003 gets under way, is also organizing a session on economic viability for PTC2003.
Christina Higa, director of the PEACESAT program in Honolulu, says that laying fiber optic cable is not a viable way of connecting the region. “Probably satellite,” she says, “is a better way to get the infrastructure.” But even here there are problems. “Many of the old satellites are locked into long-term agreements that mean high prices, and others are spot beamed to the areas of highest population.” Some of the U.S.-affiliated islands, Higa says, are eligible for the Universal Access Fund, which U.S. telecom customers pay into to help subsidize rural and remote access to telecommunications. American Samoa, Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas can take advantage of this fund. “American Samoa,” Higa says, “has one of the most advanced access situations in the Pacific. The Department of Education in the territory gets a 90 percent discount on their telecom services because of the fund. In the end,” she adds, “it all comes back to policy.” And the access fund is one example of a policy that works. Wedemeyer notes that “you don’t hear a lot of talk about e-commerce in the Pacific Islands. But there are creative ways of thinking about this and I think e-commerce can be viable in some of the bigger economic activities in the region, like fishing, shipping and tourism.”
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If there are stiff challenges for telecom in the Islands, there have also been recent encouraging developments. Palau, Guam and Yap have signed on to a cooperative project that will see the laying of fiber-optic cable between the three places. The Federated States of Micronesia Telecom is reengineering itself to improve its customer service, billing and to make way for what it calls “convergent telephony,” a one-stop telecom shop for all telecom services. Telecom Vanuatu Ltd. has adopted GSM, (Groupe Spéciale Mobile) wireless standards developed in Europe in order to provide a full range of telecom products to its customers. GSM is also used in New Zealand, New Caledonia, Fiji, Tonga and French Polynesia. In Vanuatu, an Alcatel GSM network also covers the capital of Port Vila and some of its outlying villages.
The so-called “last mile problem” is still very much with telecom providers in the region. Wedemeyer says “getting from servers to users with any speed at all is still a big issue in the Islands.” He foresees the new wireless technologies carrying data from a satellite ground station in a line-of-sight fashion from one “pod” to another, much in the way cellular telephones now function. This would eliminate the high cost of laying fiber optic cable from the ground station to the end users, an endeavor too costly for most Island markets.
The Pacific Islands Chapter of the Internet Society and the Internet Users Society of Niue cosponsored an Internet security workshop in Nadi, Fiji last November. It gave engineers from around the region hands-on experience with new security techniques. The Pacific Chapter of the Internet Society also evaluates new technologies with island needs in mind. They recently looked at a new line of small servers called Qube2, produced by Cobalt Networks, which is a low-cost, low-shipping weight solution to the installation and shipping problems encountered with the larger servers.
Another major issue throughout the region is the stranglehold that government-operated telecoms have in some Island markets. Monopoly issues have surfaced in PNG and the Solomons. The government of Fiji is being taken to court by an American telecom, TELPAC, which has been operating in Fiji successfully until new legislation impacted its operations. The TELPAC lawsuit threatens the government with damages as high as US$100 million. TELPAC entered the Fiji market as the government attempted to privatize some of its telecom services.
Privatization, the watchword of a globalized telecom infrastructure, has not always been successful in the region. The Guam Telephone Authority has had difficulty finding any interested buyers—again because the economics of small markets can make investments in Island telecom operations unappealing.
The Solomon Islands government is going in the other direction, trying to keep its telecom monopoly. The Pacific Islands Chapter of the Internet Society has publicly opposed the Solomons Telekom bid for an exclusive license for 25 years, a proposal that is now on the table there.
Both Zia and Wedemeyer think that telecom security is going to be on everyone’s minds at this month’s meetings. Wedemeyer puts it bluntly, “Frankly, I can’t imagine any of our networks being very safe.” Open to sabotage of various kinds, unprotected telecom networks could be infiltrated and bring regional government and commerce to a standstill.
These are just some of the issues the PTC2003 and PITA meeting attendees will have to talk about. The Pacific region is a complicated web of wires, cables and signals linked to another complicated web of technologies, software, policy issues and the realities of doing business in Oceania.
