French Polynesia joins PITA

French Polynesia’s telecom office (OPT) has joined the Pacific Islands Telecommunication Association (PITA) with the aim of bringing down the costs of regional telecommunications, daily newspaper La Depeche de Tahiti reported.

An agreement was signed between OPT, Cook Islands telecom, and Intelsat company.

The idea would be to join forces between Pacific islands telecommunication companies in order to be able to negotiate lower costs, especially for international telecommunications and Internet access.

“The whole point of all these links and networks is not to generate difficulties, but to allow more fluid connections”, OPT General manager Geoffry Salmon said.

OPT is currently using the Teleglobe company for its international connections.

PITA-Net, through a satellite

connection, aims at grouping Internet reception needs for each country’s operator.

The agreement makes provision for the opening of this network to twelve other operators in the region, including Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Tonga, Kiribati, Marshall islands, Niue, Palau and Solomon islands.

There are an estimated 4,500 Internet users in French Polynesia (out of a population of around 200,000).

“The main advantage of this is to be part of one community in the Pacific, and to share a capacity which will be common to all of these Pacific islands. This would enable us to benefit from a more adapted billing, hopefully lower”, Salmon said.

“I think in the Pacific islands, operators are small, the markets are small, the economies are small. So there is a need to share resources, there is a great potential there”. (OFO/Secretariat of the Pacific Community, 2000) ■