Lowering the cost of internet


Internet or international network has reduced the size of the global village consi­derably since its big leap in the 1990s. More than a third of the world’s human population, or about 2.4 billion people, have used the services of the internet as of June 2012,  according to Wikipedia, the internet’s “free encyclopaedia”.

Papua New Guinea, being part and parcel of the global community, also enjoys the services provided by the internet. In fact, the lives of an increasing number of our citizens now revolve around the internet.
Last week, a visiting Uni­ted States government official expressed concern about the high cost of internet services in PNG, which may hinder greater access by our people to this world bank of information.
To access information via the internet, we need to have connectivity links, which are directly influenced by two major telecommunication infrastructure fronts.

This relates directly to the international undersea fibre cable landings and the nearest high capacity broadband satellite landing stations within our region and reach. In terms of the high speed/capacity fibre landings, PNG is fortunate to have two major undersea fibre landings. One lands at Ela Beach in Port Moresby – APNG-2 and other in Madang – PPC-1.

The APNG-2 fibre cable has termination points in Sydney, Australia, while the PPC-1 fibre cable link has one termination point in Guam and the other in Sydney.
Currently, access and pricing to these capacities and bandwidth is controlled more or less as a monopoly by Telikom PNG.

The government announced last week the determination from a recent public inquiry into the pricing regime on the international cable access which was carried by the country’s ICT regulatory and policy arm, NICTA.
In a nutshell, the inquiry found that while it was not wrong for a single entity such as Telikom to have monopoly over these cable access, it was also anti-competition as they were in the commercial space of providing internet services and, hence, positioning other players not to directly compete with them to offer such capacities, which could in turn lower the internet rates.

Looking more at the fibre cable access, one does not have to look far to compare the current retail internet prices offered by Telikom retail services Telinet, Digicel and bemobile.
It is obvious that Telikom has the lowest retail rate despite its monopoly on the international cable access and the internet gateway services.

As for internet service providers in PNG such as Datec and Daltron, the internet gateway access is still not deregulated and all ISP are still required by law to connect to Telikom, which owns this internet gateway and the international cable access. So, how can we move forward to lower our retail internet cost?

The recent government announcement on the determination of the international cable access is a breath of fresh air for all ISP provi­ders and telecommunication in PNG.  But the government still has more to plough through and make this a reali­ty. Regulatory bodies such as NICTA and ICCC need to initiate a strategy and implementation plan to deregulate the internet gateway services.

In line with the recent announcement, this can mean two positive options for ISP with deregulation of the ISP gateway. The ISP companies could either secure cheaper direct cable access to competitive offshore ISP gateways of their choice and commercial viability. Alternatively, they can secure a lower and attractive fixed wholesale rate from the existing provider, Telikom, which would naturally respond to competition to lower their prices. The ISPs can readily factor lower wholesale pricing into their retail pricing mo­dels.

This can mean only one thing, a brewing of competition among ISP and other internet service providers, including the mobile phone operators. The government can also empower ICCC to ensure a pricing regime on all ISP and mobile operators. Once that rate is determined and set by law, it must continue to mo­nitor all ISP and mobile ope­rators on their retail pricing.

Having achieved that, the government must create appropriate policies to attract more media content deployment in-country as internet usage increases. This can be done by creating attractive business environment, taxing regimes and other policies pertaining to ICT operations.
With the appropriate mechanisms in place, this will transpire into a lower internet cost per byte and give the majority of Papua New Guineans greater access to internet services at affordable rates.

OP/ED

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