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Viewing report
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Papua New Guinea - Telecoms, Mobile and Broadband
Paul Budde Communication Pty Ltd, Aug 2011, Pages: 25
The mainland of Papua New Guinea and around 600 outlying islands are in Melanesia, located in the southwest Pacific Ocean only about 160kms north of Australia. The western half of the mainland adjoins the New Guinea Island which is part of Indonesia.
The topography of the island is mountainous and tropical with the majority of the land under customary land ownership. Subsistence based agricultural products and petroleum products are among the largest export industries The massive mineral developments needs fast broadband and communications to interact on the world stage as by end 2011 over 30 million oz of gold and silver plus over 160,000 tonnes of copper are expected to be extracted from the country. A fibre-optic network is being constructed as part of the LNG project and is expected to be in operation by early 2012.
Even though Papua New Guinea has a relatively advanced telecom network compared with many other developing nations, tele-density and fixed-internet penetration remains very low as nearly 90% of the population live outside the major cities.
In mid-2011 Digicel was granted new licenses by the new telecoms and ICT regulator NICTA allowing a second fixed-line operator in the country. Telecoms infrastructure is limited to the major urban centres including Port Moresby, Lae and Mt Hagen leaving the majority of rural areas poorly served. The additional Digicel licenses may see this change as they deploy new services. Meanwhile a national broadband plan is being developed in 2011 to meet the needs of the developing exporting industries.
But the power of communication and social interaction has increased rapidly since the mobile tower rollouts by the two mobile operators across PNG – Digicel PNG and B-Mobile – with uptake increasing rapidly since the late 2000s. Both operators now have 3G/CDMA networks in 2011.
From independence in 1975 until mid-2011 the country was overseen by Sir Michael Somare who became the first Prime Minister of the country.
Please note that this report is updated infrequently due to limited availability of information on the local telecoms market.
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