Wireless internet reaching Pacific islands

The email-addicted who holiday only in places with wireless internet access can add the Cook Islands to their list of possible destinations.

Cook Islands ISP Oyster Net has installed two Wi-Fi hotspots in Avarua, the main town on Rarotonga, the biggest of the Cooks' 15 islands.

The internet service provider, owned by Telecom Cook Islands - in turn 60 per cent owned by Telecom NZ - used equipment and services of Auckland company Network Service Providers to manage the hotspots.

One is at Telecom Cook Islands' head office and the other in downtown Avarua, covering the central business district.

Those wanting pool-side internet access won't have long to wait, says Telecom Cook Islands' marketing manager John Gaukroger.

Gaukroger says the plan is to install four more hotspots shortly, starting with the Edgewater Resort, Rarotonga's biggest.

Edgewater assistant general manager Haimona Browne says while there is no evident pent-up demand for such a service, it will be a useful selling point for the hotel, which is a frequent conference venue.

"There's no cost involved for the hotel so we're very keen to try it out," Browne said.

"There's been no demand from guests yet but as we get this up and running, we'll be able to add it to our marketing collateral. We're hoping that a lot of business travellers will see it as an advantage."

The hotel will be glad of the service for its own use, Browne says. At present, like the bulk of Oyster Net's 1500 or so subscribers, internet access is via a dial-up connection.

"It's not the fastest of systems, nor the most reliable, but it does the job."

Jonathan Prentice, NSP's technical director, was one of two staff who travelled to Rarotonga to help with the installation. According to Prentice, NSP won the business against a bid by Gen-i, the Telecom-owned IT services arm.

"Telecom rocked up with its big fat quote and we rocked up with ours, which did what Oyster Net wanted, instead of having a fixed feature set, and away we went," said Prentice.

"They want to be able to sell cheap and easily accessible internet to visitors and to the locals and our solution does it."

Prentice says NSP has provided a full billing, management and quality of service monitoring system for the hotspots.

"We do everything - DNS, hosting the web front-end, accounting for the traffic and providing them all the billing information - and it just plugs into their internet service."

Telecom Cook Islands' Gaukroger says a prepaid card will be required to use the hotspots, ranging in price from $15 for 100 megabytes of traffic to $64 for 800MB.