Pacific ICT market better than Africa - Kacific

Transcript

The chief executive of a satellite broadband provider Kacific says the Pacific is a more lucrative market than larger ICT companies realise.

Christian Patouraux who has just signed a $US78 million dollar deal with Indonesian satellite service provider BigNet says most international ICT companies ignore the Pacific.

Mr Patouraux told Koroi Hawkins this perception is wrong.

CHRISTIAN PATOURAUX: Very few large corporations consider the Pacific as a real primary market. There is a general perception in large corporations that the Pacific has no market. But the reality is when you really assess it, the Pacific has a lot more potential per capita than Africa. You'd have in the Pacific people that are very well educated, who have a fairly good disposable income despite some arguing that the disposable income is low but there is a lot of general support to the Pacific to deploy connectivity. And there is a real craving for connectivity in the Pacific.

KOROI HAWKINS: Now there is a big push for underwater fibre-optic cables in the Pacific does this conflict with your market in anyway or does it complement it?

CP: Yes so it doesn't conflict with it as all its actually, it actually drives and fuels the demand for bandwidth if you take the example of Vanuatu which received the cable last year. Immediately after connecting their cable to the capital city Port Vila their government saw an opportunity to roll out a universal access policy for the entire country. So that's when Kacific comes in the picture and that's when we started discussions in earnest with the local government and coming back to what we discussed. What our vision is that there is no rich way and no poor way of consuming the internet. There is only one way of consuming the internet. Wherever you are in   the world the internet and its applications are developed for one particular speed. You can't consume the internet unless you have enough of this speed that comes to your device. And so Kacific develops its solutions to give enough of this speed and to give enough of bandwidth volume. So that people will be able to consume the internet when they will click on a Youtube or Vimeo or whatever daily motion site. They will get the video they have clicked for and not run the risk of reaching their maximum quota after a couple of minutes of watching the video. So that is how we think the internet should be consumed and that is what Kacific will provide across the entire pacific.