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East-west Pacific cable

The first Oceania Com conference, which was held in Sydney earlier this week brought together 125 people from ten countries in the South Pacific. The conference was organised by London-based Informa; BuddeComm arranged the conference program and chaired the event. The region is the most remote in the world, with 22 of the island countries only covering 3.5 million people. Economic growth for this region is only possible through participation in the global economy. Infrastructure is a very urgent problem; telephone calls are among the highest in the world. Some of the islands in the region have amongst the highest growth rates in mobile in the world, and one of the lowest Internet penetrations.

Both the Australian and New Zealand governments were well represented and papers were presented from The Hon David Cunliffe, Minister for Communications in New Zealand, The Hon Stephen Conroy, Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy in Australia, as well as by The Hon Bob McMullen, Parliamentary Secretary for International Development Assistance.

Ultimately fibre networks are the way forward for this region, in order to bring economic prosperity to the region, and while these networks are unaffordable for most island countries a combined venture by all governments, telcos and donors could see the deployment of a submarine fibre network covering all the countries in the South Pacific.

Remi Galasso, CEO of SPIN Limited (South Pacific Island Networks), announced exclusively at the conference the launch of a 6,500km, E150 million, east-west submarine cable plan across the South Pacific. This would link the other two new submarine networks, the Sydney-Noumea (completion August 2008) and the Hawaii-Tahiti link (completion April 2010). This all-important east-west connection is planned for completion by 2010.

According to SPIN, the project is financially backed by the French government. Also the governments of New Caledonia, Wallis and Fortuna, America Samoa, Nuie and French Polynesia have signed up, and individual telcos will now also be invited to join.

According to BuddeComm, if this is a viable project then it is one of the most important telecom developments ever for the smaller South Pacific island states. It would be a truly unique opportunity to link most (hopefully all) of the island communities to this network.

The conference concluded that, given this ground-breaking project, the possibility of coordinating the various aid initiatives from governments, international organisations, regulators etc should be investigated. Any potential synergy between these aid projects should be explored, and how that could be utilised to make the project happen.

Key outcomes of the conference

Coordination is required regarding the various aid initiatives offered by governments, international organisations, regulators and others.
Investigating if there is synergy between these projects, and how that could be utilised by the various island countries.
Continued sharing of business information regarding, new developments, business opportunities, technology results and community activities.
A call for speeding up the harmonisation process - without this the region will forever lag behind the rest of the world. The pace urgently needs to be picked up in the areas of regulation, standards and deployment of common technologies, interconnect rates and joint infrastructure projects.
More information and advice is needed on the organisation of the regulatory process (in some countries several ministers/departments are involved which makes is very unwieldy).
Attention also needs to be directed at ways to limit the level of regulation, while still moving forward; in general terms a far more simplistic regulatory system is needed in order to make it affordable for these small countries.
Joint efforts to address and combat vandalism and copper theft.

An industry based South Pacific Special Interest Group has been established to take these initiatives forwards.

East-west Pacific cable

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