Deloitte report nothing new

THE Deloitte consultancy report, Why are Internet Prices High in PNG, presents a few regulatory and policy ideas worth noting.
However, it missed out critical discussions on cost, funding and social settings which in my opinion would have given some breath of new life into what is actually a replay of ideas circulated in the past.
This like all past consultancy reports, do not advice on how to do things but only provide shallow highlights on high level problems that we already know exist.
There are many issues that we can chat about but the few I consider of relevance are listed below.
It is disappointing that a lot of advanced matured and irrelevant markets key performance indicators (KPIs) were listed, but not a reference was made to in any way, shape and form of the alignment to the Government’s overarching national strategies.
These (strategies) would explain why the Government has and is investing heavily in building national companies driven by the StaRS logo PNG Em Mi Yah.
The Government wants PNG citizens to be players too in this high tech industry and not just minority bystander shareholders in our own country.
The options for public listing of state owned enterprises is what the report could have elaborate further on including the appointment criteria of board directors and the independence of the boards through company constitutions – and not only to lure the Government to change its policy direction to give room to foreign players to strive on what is basically a Blue Ocean market.
In PNG, a minimum of three people on average use one mobile phone.  That is the social setting.
How does this compare with the KPIs given in the report, when the access is increased by 300 per cent and Gross National Income (GNI) per capita increased up to possible 300 per cent for that one particular device?
Why should this not be considered as relevant to the discussions of affordability, access and Internet penetration?
The report also raised a number of questions on the ICT Policy of 2008 not meeting some of the KPIs. Welcome to Real PNG.
One of the issues you got to understanding is that this policy was also written by an overseas consultancy firm with little space given for quality national views that were presented at that time.
Some of the KPIs when raised then would work in Australia but in PNG it is another ball game, but no one listened.
So who do you blame for the non-performance, Telikom PNG, the ISPs or the consultants that wrote the Policy for Government?
Discussions in relation to regulatory gaps highlighted use of smart phones.
There is no mention of the Over The Top (OTT) content use like facebook, WhatsApp etc, which are actually are leaches to ISP revenue and give smartphones that usage power base as a selling point.
Regulatory options on how these services should coexist and not be detrimental to ISPs revenue could have been mentioned in your report for consideration by Nicta and ICCC.
OTT is responsible for millions of kina in losses to voice call providers in PNG.  With the issue of cost reductions, when Telikom PNG reduced the cost of Internet connection, in the recent past, no clear indication of this price drop was seen at the ISPs.
I agree with the report comments that perhaps some proper regulatory mechanisms would help in improvement of transparency in how to see this especially in light of proposed price drops in Internet wholesale charges by Dataco PNG.
Also with market interventions of smart technology approaches like the Internet Exchange Point (IXP) by Nicta, Google cache and PNG National Data Centre currently hosting the National Identity (NID) Project, how would ISPs price data sourced from offshore and data that is cached or distributed nationally through these interventions?
Contrary to popular belief as mentioned in your report, IXPs do stimulate growth of local circulating traffic through in-country website hosting and data centre functionality as well as growth in SMEs for the ICT sector.
Vanuatu, installed an IXP in 2014 and witnessed local traffic increase averaged around 250 per cent. Not all is dull, gloom and doom for PNG.
We are growing and improving as we go but we will get there.
Trust local advice as it is always critical to PNG ground zero relativity.

Noel Mobiha,
Vanimo, WSP