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The Fiji International Telecommunications Ltd (FINTEL) maintains a dominant position on Fiji’s link to the undersea Southern Cross Cable Network (SCCN) despite today’s official liberalization of the international telecommunication market.
FINTEL’s Manager Commercial & Business Development George Samisoni said this was due to a separate commercial agreement that the company had signed with Southern Cross Cable Ltd, the consortium owners of submarine fibre optic cable, which links Fiji to Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii and the US mainland.
Known as the Landing Party Agreement, it places FINTEL as the gatekeeper of the portion of the cable that lands in Fiji, meaning that local service providers who wish to source bandwidth via the Southern Cross cable will have to go through FINTEL and the prices that it offers.
“The LPA is a long term agreement between FINTEL and SCCL,” Samisoni told FijiLive.
“The LPA regulates FINTEL’s provision of landing party and operations and maintenance services to SCCL in relation to Cable Termination Equipment and interconnection at the Cable Station in Suva and the rest of the infrastructure. The LPA does not contemplate that FINTEL will have exclusive access to the Cable Network. It provides that FINTEL is the owner of Infrastructure (and specifically the Cable Station) which is currently the only means of gaining access to the Cable Network.”
This howeverdoes not rule out the participation of other operators in establishing an LPA type agreement with the cable owners.
“Any other operator may also obtain from SCCL and create its own ‘pipeline’.
The question for any operator, however, is how it will ‘land’ any traffic transmitted on its pipeline because this needs infrastructure similar to FINTEL’s,” Samisoni said.
“So there is not and has never been any regulatory impediment to other operators purchasing capacity on the Cable Network. FINTEL has held the exclusive right to provide international gateway services to other operators. This is the exclusive right which expires on July 18.”
Samisoni said Fiji has benefited immensely from FINTEL’s investment in the Southern Cross Cable.
“Had it not been for the initial $47 million investment, in which the shareholder, Cable & Wireless played a major part, the cable would not have landed.”
The de-monopolisation of FINTEL is one of the major steps in the deregulation of Fiji’s telecommunications industry, which was set in motion in January last year through an agreement signed between government and local telecom incumbents for the early termination of their exclusive licenses in return for new 14 year open licenses.
