By Emmanuel Narokobi

Horses…I’m terrified of them. Why am I scared of horses? Well I think like most PNG’eans the biggest warm blooded animals we come across are fellow humans at night clubs and nothing as big as a horse!

 

But I feel safer around horses on TV like the ones at the Melbourne Cup. I have come to understand about horses on TV from hearing fellow punters down at the bookies on Melbourne Cup day. They say that some horses perform better in the rain and some better when it’s sunny and depending on the soil and so on and so on. So perhaps that is essentially the same thing for internet services generally and access to it. As the demand for internet increases and we look further across PNG in providing internet services, different users will require different ways to get on the internet. So you will never have a ’silver bullet’ solution but different horses for different courses.

In PNG today internet can be accessed through the following ways:

• Dial-up (available from all ISP’s); using your phone line to get onto the internet.
• Lease Line (available from Telikom through all ISP’s); having a special internet line brought into your premises for always on internet.
• Wireless broadband (available from all ISP’s); having a wireless antennae installed at your premises so that you can access internet without using the phone lines.
• WiFi (available from selected ISP’s); using your laptop, mobile phone or PDA to get wireless access to the internet in a hotspot like the Yacht Club. WiFi stands for Wireless Fidelity, read more here.
• ADSL (available only from Telikom as the Teli-Net service), is a technology that uses your existing copper phone line to provide faster data transmission for internet services. ADSL stands for Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line. Read more on ADSL here.
• VSAT (available from Telikom, Hitron and selected ISP’s); using small satellite dishes to access the internet in remote locations. VSAT stands for Very Small Aperture Terminals. Read more on VSAT’s here.

6 different ways to access the internet is encouraging but the majority of the services above are geared towards big to middle business and high income urban homes. Hence the ‘last mile‘ goal of reaching everyone right down to middle to low income urban homes and the small towns and even the villager is still an illusive task.

A suggested addition to the above list could be WiMax, as shown by our friend Asese in Vanuatu. What is WiMAX? It is a technology aimed at providing wireless data over long distances in a variety of ways, from point-to-point links to full mobile cellular type access. WiMAX allows a user, for example, to browse the Internet on a laptop without physically connecting the laptop to the internet via any cables.

The difference between WiMax and WiFi is that with WiFi you are limited in your access to a specific area. For example Daltron’s WiFi hot spots are only located at:

• Latitude 9
• Yacht Club
• Golf Club
• Crowne Plaza

They have access in office buildings as well like:

• Ela Beach Tower
• Deloitte
• Pacific Place
• Monian Tower
• Somare Foundation
• Investwell House
• Level 9 - Compound

But again from the above list you can see my point about the service being limited to big business and high income urban residences.

WiMax as opposed to Wi-Fi has a larger range and acts more like mobile coverage so that wherever you are in a city that has WiMax you can access the internet if you have the wireless cards installed in your laptop or PC’s or even mobile phones and PDA’s.

A Malaysian friend of mine emailed me a news article about WiMAX developments in his country and they made some interesting comments in regards to seeing WiMAX the way we see mobile phone access. The Francis Yeoh of YTLE said

“I look forward to the day very soon when I can use my WiMAX broadband to access the Internet anywhere in the world, the same way I use my GSM phone,” he said.

He added: “As YTLE begins to deploy its network in Malaysia, it recognises that a key component to the success of WiMAX will be roaming, not just for Malaysia but on a global scale.”

I know that we may have to wait a bit before WiMAX or internet roaming on wireless devices happens in PNG. However I believe that it is something to consider for the ‘last mile‘. If PC’s are too expensive for starters then maybe mobile phone’s can come in as an alternative for internet access. Maybe just for emails so that small businesses or low income homes can at least email for work, business and keeping in touch with family. What about the small towns and villagers? Maybe WiMAX and/or WiFi could be an option for them out there, in terms of using mobile internet.

For small towns and villages a hypothetical setup could possibly work like this. A VSAT system is setup to send internet from Port Moresby to Kwikila, Central Province. Then from Kwikila a WiMAX and/or WiFi setup could be used to provide internet to the mobile phones and PC’s in small businesses, homes and villages around that area in a possible radius of a couple 100 kilometres.

Below is just one of many GSM/WiFI phones coming out today that could be used as one access device in our hypothetical WiMAX/WiFI setup.

 

The Nokia 6136 (launched last year some time) can be used to make VoIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol, like Skype) calls at WiFi hot spots, allowing them to avoid paying a mobile call charge — although they may have to pay for WiFi access instead.

The 6136 could also encourage B-mobile and Digicel to offer new services that require high-speed access. GSM only supports basic data services, because of its limited bandwidth, whereas WiFi can theoretically support connections of speeds in excess of 50Mbps.

A discussion like this about different technology solutions for internet access will no doubt be an ongoing one. A new development may pop up tomorrow to add a different way of communicating with each other. One thing seems for certain with internet access and just communications in general in PNG and that is due to our varied and difficult geography, our courses will most certainly need more than one type of horse.

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For more reading, see A New Model for Rural Connectivity by Al Hammond & John Paul, May 2006