Telikom PNG still has costs to deal with, executive says

TELIKOM PNG Ltd still has costs to deal with especially in maintaining its infrastructures, chief executive Xavier Victor says.
“There will be some savings from our operations because now we get more reliability and consistency in the service that our wholesale upstream providers will be providing through the cables,” Victor said.
“But we still have a lot of cost that we still need to deal with.”
Victor was in Wewak, East Sepik, last Friday at the landing of the Kumul submarine cable network .
“We got existing infrastructure for example between here (Wewak) and Maprik,” he said.
“We got towers to that we need to maintain.
“Some are off the highway where we need to get chopper to go there, depending on weather conditions.
“These are kind of operations that we continue to maintain.
“We will have to find ways to make sure that we reduce our cost for those sites.
“Then we can be able to reflect that on our cost.” On the internet price, Victor said internet rates were cut by 80 per cent almost 10 months ago.
“That was never done before – a 80 per cent reduction of our cost,” he said. “We did that in complete confidence to Dataco rolling out the cable about this time.
“So it is not something that we did out of pressure or anyone.
“It was based on planned strategy that we wanted to start to win our customers, to give them the confidence before the cable comes in.”