Although mobile phone services do impact on the economy and no doubt Digicel has achieved that here in PNG. It will only be when internet access is made cheaper and practically available to all walks of life that we will see real strides being taken in development.

I guess as you’ve pointed out, Digicel is a key tool in the World Bank’s arsenal in driving ‘functional separation’. But currently only at the mobile phone level. I imagine that you have to start somewhere and when dealing with governments like ours in PNG, you can only go forward in baby steps.

So when can we make the next baby steps towards universal internet access? I hope soon, but the gateway issue is a major part of competition for anyone trying to bring cheaper/faster internet to PNG or Fiji.

The way I see it until the governments are ready to allow competition at the gateway level, then we will not see any change soon to internet services. In the short term however I’ve been wondering whether a pure play ISP could be cheaper without all the staff and extra stock in trying sell PC’s and related IT services. If we had an ISP that sold nothing but internet time, maybe we could get prices lower, although the challenge in that would be to build scale to truly be an economical business model.