Mobile fever reaches Pacific shores

WELLINGTON -- The Pacific islands are the last frontier for mobile telecommunications but the arrival of Irish-owned Digicel Pacific in the past three years has brought about a revolution.

Residents of the islands and visitors all have horror stories about the poor service and sky-high charges of telecoms monopolies in the Pacific.

But the arrival of competition through Digicel means Pacific islanders are beginning to experience the mobile phone revolution.
Digicel opened its first Pacific operations in Samoa on Nov. 1, 2006 --exactly three years ago.

Now it has expanded to Papua New Guinea, Tonga, Vanuatu, Fiji and Nauru, a total market of 7.5 million people, and the company has invested more than $500 million and now employs 1,100 people.

“It’s most certainly improved the lives of millions of people in the region,” Digicel Pacific chief executive Vanessa Slowey said.

Most of the island nations Digicel entered were previously served by a state-owned mobile monopoly, except for Nauru which had no commercial mobile service at all.

Rod Duncan, an economics lecturer with an interest in Pacific development, of Charles Sturt University in New South Wales, Australia, said telecommunications in the Pacific were “appalling”, with some of the highest charges anywhere in the world.

“No wonder it’s so easy for Digicel to come in against these great vast, inefficient, lumbering beasts that existed by gouging their customers.”

Owned by Irish telecommunications entrepreneur Denis O’Brien, Digicel in 2001 entered the Caribbean, where the company now operates in 26 markets.

The company’s experience in establishing itself in the Caribbean’s many small island markets made expanding into the Pacific a logical move.

“If you look at the Pacific region it’s a mirror image of where the Caribbean was about eight years ago, with a high demand for communications services, widespread customer dissatisfaction, generally high tariffs and low mobile penetration,” Ms. Slowey told AFP.

“If I put the mobile device in people's hands, if I make it affordable enough to use that device, then I have got a customer,” she added.

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Mobile fever reaches Pacific shores