Pacific Magazine > Daily News

Digicel PNG Set To Provide Nationwide Coverage

By Alexander Rheeney in Port Moresby
Friday: December 28, 2007

Irish-owned mobile phone operator Digicel (PNG) Ltd will expand its network to 11 Papua New Guinea provinces next year to give it nationwide coverage.

Its network currently covers PNG’s capital city Port Moresby and the provinces of Central, Morobe, Madang, Chimbu, Eastern Highlands, Western Highlands, East New Britain and New Ireland.

Milne Bay, Oro, Gulf, Western, Southern Highlands, Enga, East Sepik, Sandaun, Manus, West New Britain and the autonomous region of Bougainville will be the new additions in the New Year to complete Digicel’s nationwide presence.

Its expansion will represent a further investment of K600 million (US$204 million) by July next year when it celebrates the second anniversary of its PNG operations.

But securing an interconnection agreement with the government-owned B-Mobile, to enable its customers to call users of the rival network as well as landlines, appears to be the only black mark in what was otherwise a successful seven months.

However, government sources have revealed that negotiations between Digicel and Telikom PNG, the parent company of B-Mobile, are ongoing and a compromise could be reached early next year.

B-Mobile is also flourishing in the competitive environment with its customer base now at about 340,000 and increasing as it runs an aggressive marketing campaign side-by-side with Digicel and introduces cheaper mobile handsets and SIM cards as well as free credit calls.

“New customers are joining the B-Mobile network in thousands every month and we have the capacity to deal with the increase in the number of callers,” said Telikom official Kevin Malai in a recent telecommunications newspaper feature.

Digicel is tightlipped about its customer base but the number of its network users should be double that of B-Mobile.

The two rival firms are currently head-to-head in offering their customers discount rates during the festive season with Digicel giving a 0.99 toea (US$0.34) per minute rate for international calls effective December 16 to January 5, 2008 while B-Mobile offers the same rate but effective from December 14 to January 14 in the New Year.

B-Mobile has announced that it will in the near future offer the “365 SMS access,” which would enable its customers to send SMS to addresses of 750 mobile phone operators throughout the world.

But while the government-owned company has done major upgrades in anticipation of the high demand for its services during the festive season, its network continues to experience dropouts due to traffic congestion.

For PNG’s third GSM license holder, Indonesian-owned Green Communications (GreenCom), there is an air of uncertainty about its operations as it was scheduled to launch its network in October but is yet to announce its plans.

With a population of 5.9 million people and mobile penetration at just 1 percent before the entry of the two foreign-owned companies, PNG government officials expect penetration to double within the next 12 months of their operations.