The Communication Enhancement through Telecommunication (ComET) project

The Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC) has made strenuous efforts to address communication imperatives for its programme delivery to its member countries. Initially, it used the Internet to assist in programme delivery. However, the low availability and high costs of telecommunications in Noumea and Suva hampered these efforts. The use of PACNET (the communications service of the Pacific Public Health Surveillance Network) was very successful but restricted by communication capabilities and lack of connectivity. In 1998 the capacity was limited to 28.8 kilobytes per second (kbps) in Noumea and 1.9 kbps in Suva with no possibility of obtaining additional capacity at affordable costs through the commercial telecommunications carriers. The ComET project has now installed 7.2 metre antenna and associated equipment at each of the Secretariat's offices in Noumea and Suva. This allows 24 hour per day access to the PAS2 satellite for high speed transmission of voice, data and video traffic. Connection to the Offratel premises in Nouville via the Celeris high speed backbone operated by OPT has linked this to the internet and thereby to member countries and territories, and the rest of the world. The ComET project began transmission in March 2000 and has addressed communication problems, and thereby improved the SPC's programme delivery (examples given in this paper) to it's members at affordable costs within the Secretariats existing budget.