PAPEÉTE, Tahiti (Tahitipresse, Nov. 16, 2009)— A 21st Century multi-media Internet world of communications is about a week away from starting at Bora Bora on Nov. 24 with the placing of a US$122 million undersea fiber optic cable that will extend to Hawaii and become operational next May or June.

One of French Polynesia's most ambitious development projects in many years is expected to increase today's Internet speed 40 times, but also allow for 20 percent less expensive subscription rates, the Office des Postes et Télécommunications (OPT) has announced.The Ile de Ré, a 469-foot (143-meter) long cable laying and repair vessel, is due to arrive in French Polynesia next Saturday to start work at Bora Bora on Nov. 24, the OPT announced during a press conference last Friday. The work schedule for the ship, which is specially designed to hold its position without the use of anchors, calls for the cable arriving at:

•    Raiatea on Nov. 28

•    Huahine on Dec. 4

•    Tahiti's sister island of Moorea on Dec. 12, and

•    The Island of Tahiti on Dec. 15, specifically at a special building the OPT has prepared in the north coast Commune of Papenoo. This is also where the undersea cable will depart for Hawaii.

Thus, in less than a month, the 394 kilometers (245 miles) of undersea fiber optic cable taking French Polynesia into a new dimension of multimedia communications in terms of opportunities and speed will be in place and ready for the next step.

That step will cover 4,650 kilometers (2,889 miles) of cable laying from Tahiti to Hawaii, where the ship is due to finish its work on Feb. 25, 2010 at the Big Island of Hawaii.

The project, with the Tahitian name of “Honotua” (the link towards the open sea), is being carried out by Alcatel-Lucent Submarine Networks (ASN), a specialist with similar cable-laying projects in other parts of the Pacific. Pacific LightNet, one of Hawaii’s oldest Internet service providers, will operate the Honotua system in and out of Hawaii.

Honotua is just one element in the development of information technology via undersea cables throughout the South Pacific. Adding up the distances covered by the various cable projects— from Australia and New Zealand to Tahiti and Hawaii, and most of the islands along the way— produces a total of 13,355 kilometers (8,298 miles).

The overall 9.5 billion French Pacific franc (US$122m/€79.6m) cost includes 1.871 billion French Pacific francs (US$29m/€15.7m) for the work in French Polynesia and 7.656 billion French Pacific francs (US$98m/€64m) for the link with Hawaii.

The French Polynesia government is going to cover 100% of the overall 9.5bn F CFP cost. That means:

•    2.2 billion French Pacific francs (US$28.2m/€18.4m) from the OPT budget;

•    5.8 billion French Pacific francs (US$74.4m/€48.6m) in government tax exemptions; and

•    1.5 billion French Pacific francs (US$19.2m/€12.6m) in OPT loans from one of Tahiti's banks, Banque Socredo.

The OPT has announced it anticipates Honotua will produce an eventual profit of some 1.2 billion French Pacific francs (US$15m/€10m), which would reduce the amount of the bank loan.

For the Honotua project, the speed of transferring digital information internationally between computers will increase dramatically.

Every digital transmission consists of a stream of bits, or Internet data building blocks, traveling between two points. Most descriptions of Internet bandwidth measure the speed of the traveling data in bits per second, according to The Economist Pocket Internet.

So once the Honotua cable is hooked up next June between Hawaii and Tahiti, the speed of transferring digital information will increase from today’s maximum of 500 megabits per second to more than 20 gigabits per second.

One megabit is a unit of data storage equivalent to about 1m bits. So 500 Mbits equals 500m bits. One gigabit is equivalent to just over one billion bits, so 20 Gbits equals 20bn bits.

So the new speed of 20 Gbits per second will be 40 times faster than the present 500 Mbits per second. A technician at Mana, French Polynesia’s only Internet service provider, confirmed the accuracy of these figures.

The speed for transferring digital information within French Polynesia will start at 5 Gbits per second.

The faster speed is directly related to the size of data bits the undersea fiber optic cable will be able to handle—a maximum of 640Gbit per second.

(Source: East-West Center; Tahitipresse: www.tahitipresse.pf)