Paradise Foods among firms affected by telephone cables vandalism

THE country’s oldest established food manufacturing company says the vandalism of telephone cables in Lae has affected its services and incurred extra costs.
Paradise Foods Limited is among businesses in Lae affected by the vandalism on cables in the past three months.
Company information technology (IT) department staff Douglas Burain said cable theft disabled communication with local and international customers, delayed the processing of orders, affected internal communication and hindered communication with government agencies and police.
Burain said for the past three months, the company had to engage mobile telecommunication services to maintain communication systems.
He said it had incurred additional costs for the company which would be passed on to the customer.
“We’ve increased our monthly mobile credits and data on the closed-user group (CUG), engaged the mobile company to divert calls to their primary rate interface, and we’ve advised customers to contact our team on their CUG numbers.”
Telikom PNG Lae’s acting regional manager Philip Ruambi said landlines remained important even in the era of mobile phones.
Ruambi said landline cables, both copper and optic fiber, were important to business houses because of the unlimited data capacity they transmitted compared to a wireless network.
“You can never replace landline cables with mobile wireless service,” he said.
“Unfortunately people are ignorant of the impact cable vandalism had on businesses and the economy.
Ruambi said since mid-October to December, 10 sites had been vandalised costing Telikom more than K1 million in repairs and restoration.
Lae MP John Rosso called on city residents to look after government services like Telikom phone cables.
“There’s no point in you crying for services when you cannot look after the services that are provided,”he said.