CNMI business loses after comms blackout

Transcript

Businesses in the Northern Marianas are losing tens of thousands of dollars a day after a communications blackout which is continuing to affect the territory.

The undersea telecommunications link to Guam was severed by a boulder last week, cutting all phone, internet, banking and other services to the outside world.

Leilani Momoisea reports.

The president of the Saipan Chamber of Commerce,  Alexander Sablan, says businesses have been hit hard over the last few days, and it was scary to be so extremely cut off from the world.

ALEXANDER SABLAN: Commerce came to a halt, and connections with loved ones came to a halt and nobody could notify people what was going on. We're seeing a lot of people communicate that way about how it was difficult for them but I think everybody made do as best they could.

He says stores that required an internet connection for credit card swiping, particularly suffered.

ALEXANDER SABLAN: I know one of the major shopping centres on this island is losing about 20 thousand dollars a day on average, because they did not have access to their swipe machines for almost five days. We know of hotels that are losing out on internet sales which is in more recent years a significant part of their business model.

The Century Hotel in Saipan is one of the hotels losing online business as a result of the patchy internet connection. Its operations supervisor, Carlos Rivera, says they have been unable to process online requests for accommodation, and guests are furious at not being able to connect to the internet.

CARLOS RIVERA: The guests that are currently here of course are unhappy with the situation. But I guess they've done alternate things. Instead of being cooped up in their room and using their wi-fi, they're venturing out in the island and getting more sun than they've expected.

A 30 day state of emergency has been declared to allow the government to marshall resources to help fix the outage. The service provider IT&E which owns the cable says it will foot the cable repair bill of 2-million US dollars.Our Correspondent in the CNMI, Mark Rabago, says the acting governor is hoping the network will be fully restored soon.

RALPH TORRES: Ralph Torres ordered Homeland Security to form a Taskforce with IT&E, our service provider, to fix this problem as soon as possible. The emergency declaration basically helps the government marshall all (its) resources to this end.

The director of public health and hospital emergency preparedness, Warren Villagomez, says patient care has not been affected. But he says Saipan has the only hospital in CNMI that provides tertiary and intensive care, so it's critical to have continued communication with the two other islands, in case emergency evacuations are needed.

WARREN VILLAGOMEZ: We were able to communicate via Sat phones to Rota and Tinian and as well as HF and VHF radio standing up as well, that was the most efficient way to go about that at this time.

The director of external relations at the Northern Marianas College, Frankie Eliptico, says the college relies heavily on social media and email to communicate with students. He says he hopes services are back to full speed before the new semester.

FRANKIE ELIPTICO: We have very limited access to email, though it's very slow, very spotty. We still are getting very, very glacial paced connection through other social media, so we're not able to post information as quickly or as much for our students.

IT&E is still awaiting a boat from Taiwan to fix the undersea fibre optic cable, and it could be up to three weeks before normal communications are restored. Meanwhile, IT&E has partnered with its business rival Docomo, to install an aerial fibre system on Rota, which is expected to increase internet speed on Saipan.