Sex on the line

Advertising Feature

Telecom

By Bernadette Hussein

One of the more popular means of attaining sexu al gratification, espe cially in the current era of safe sex, has indirectly been creep ing into the South Pacific. Telephone sex or, more technically speaking, a form of audiotec is, in fact, already here with the potential to increase rev enue for some of the smaller island nations, including Tuvalu, Tokelau and Niue. Niue and Tuvalu, for exam ple, had 10 per cent of their revenue generated from the international phone sex service last year.

But that is not to say the ethics of the situation have not come into play. In an interview earlier this year, Tuvalu’s prime minister, Bikenibeu Paeniu, said that the discovery that Tuvalu’s phone lines were being used for the sex service was a major moral issue for the religious country.

Tuvalu, which is a tiny atoll nation, earned SUSI. 2 million last year and looks set to earn double that amount this year. A spokesman for Carrier Telecom in Tuvalu said the sex service had been available through the country’s telephone lines since the end of 1995.

“The service has been made available since the signing of a tripartite agreement between Carrier Telecom, the Tuvalu gov ernment and Asia Pacific Telecommunications, the company respon sible for providing such a service,” he said.

He said he had no idea how many tele phone lines were being used but APT was using Tuvalu’s country code, which is 0688, to provide the sex service.

Advertisement for sex lines using Tuvalu’s country code appear in magazines in Britain, the United States and Japan.

Niue, which leased its lines to the ser vice, took on a more moral approach earli er this year. In February, Niue’s premier, Frank Lui, ordered that the country’s tele phone lines be removed from the world wide sex service because he wanted the country to maintain a clean reputation.

Niue was a Christian state and he wanted

to keep it that way, Lui said.

Fiji and Kiribati have refused to be party to the scheme. The chief executive of Kiribati Telecom Service, Cliff Macalpine, said they had turned down approaches by a number of companies to use their lines.

“Superficially, it is a very attractive business and there is income without the country having to invest,” said Macalpine.

“But there are a number of drawbacks. We have been unable to satisfy ourselves that the contents of the service can be con trolled.

“Some stuff shown is OK but others are

quite dubious. I have heard of examples where countries signed agreements for audiotec without being specifically told about the nature of the contents. They think the contents are good and clean but, to their horror, find things are nothing like what they thought. Until we can satisfy our selves that the contents will be clean we will not go into this service.”

While the short-term benefits were very attractive, the rental was quite insecure,

Macalpine said.

“One day they will be there, but they can decide at any time to pack up and go -

Sex on the line

and then what happens? This is OK, but if you have forecast the use of the money made from this in other projects and have started on them, then you are in trouble.”

Macalpine said that he, personally, did not see the government of Kirbati ever supporting such a basis for busi ness. And, he added, it was a question of ethics.

Like Kiribati, it was a question of ethics for Fiji. Fiji International Telecommunications Limited (FINTEL) general manager Mohammed Farouk said the company had been approached several times to lease telephone lines but that they had refused. Farouk said audiotec involved a lot of factors, some of which were fairly sensitive to some people, for example, adult programmes.

“When approached, we made our position clear that we would not enter tain those sorts of programmes. But any thing else, for instance, services like horoscopes, tarot cards, etc - if the oper ators can come up with things like that, then we would take them up on those.

“We’ve had offers over the past 18 months to two years for the use of our lines. The requests come from various sources. There is quite a large number of operators out there and we have been approached by operators in Israel, Germany and Hong Kong.”

Another country considering this deal is Tokelau. However, a representative from the country’s telecommunications company declined to comment on the issue. And, according to a report carried by Agence France-Presse, the country codes of Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu were also being used in the business. However, confir mation of this could not be obtained by the respective countries. So, how does the system work?

Each country has a country code which is its international identity, Farouk said, then within the national network, depending on how big the network is, uses up number ranges. Smaller coun tries, such as Niue and Tokelau, have a very small number of subscribers.

“How these operators offer audiotec is that they try and lease a block of num bers from these countries together with their country code. “Then what they do is have an interim arrangement because you need three parties to set this up. “For

example, if a call originates from some where in Europe the originator will detect that it is a call for, say, Fiji. It will then route it in a certain direction because we do not have direct routes to Europe. “So, for instance, if it is going to come through New Zealand, the service provider will have to have an arrange ment with New Zealand that the numbers from, say, Niue, Tokelau and Fiji will be detected in the New Zealand exchange.

“While this number will have a coun try code for Fiji, this number range is not supposed to go to Fiji, so it will go and terminate in some data bank in New Zealand and then is connected to the ser vice dialled for.”

He stressed that, like other telecom operators, the country which leases these numbers usually would not have access to the data banks and be unable to access this service.

“Basically, the system works because of the difference in what we call accounting rates. So it is only attractive if you have high accounting rates.

“If the accounting rate is low then the benefits, according to the service provider, are going to be very low.”

Accounting rates, Farouk said, were agreements between two countries.

For instance, if someone sets up a ser vice between New Zealand and Fiji, they agree to a certain fixed fee to carry each other’s traffic. So, if someone from Fiji calls New Zealand, the call goes through FINTEL, in Fiji, who then switches it to New Zealand and then the New Zealand exchange has the responsibility of redis tributing it to the number dialled. Each of the parties agrees at so many cents to carry each other’s traffic onwards.

The general accounting rate is then split halfway. Farouk said while this was quite an old trade for the rest of the world, it was fairly new in the Pacific.

So why the sudden interest in the Pacific?

“These operators move from country to country, and I think what is happening is that the interest in the Pacific is gener ated by the fact that we still have fairly high accounting rates. Accounting rates is where the money is, which is why they try and use the smaller and developing countries which have these high rates.”

As for the countries leasing their lines: “Well without any overheads, they make profits. “They don’t have to set up an exchange and can still make a lot of money out of it.” ■