Haphazard restoration for Pacific telecoms

International telecommunications to several Pacific Islands remain haphazard despite efforts to restore links after a satellite failure affected 11 countries.

Telecom is working to patch up services but even those said to have been restored were struggling to cope yesterday because of overloaded lines.

Contact was lost with an Intelsat satellite after a power failure caused it to move out of alignment on Saturday.

Services were restored to Rarotonga in the Cook Islands, Samoa and the Solomon Islands at the weekend and yesterday partial services were restored to Tonga, American Samoa and Vanuatu.

Telecom spokeswoman Sarah Berry said Kiribati, Tuvalu and Tokelau were still without services.

Scott Base was also without telephone coverage but had emergency backups. Ms Berry said Telecom expected all services to be restored by early next week.

The disrupted telephone traffic represented about 5 per cent of New Zealand international calls.

New Zealand was unlikely to face similar problems because 90 per cent of its international telecommunication was provided by a submarine cable.

Antarctica New Zealand communications manager Emma Reid said contact was being maintained with the 70 staff at Scott Base in a variety of ways.

Emails were being sent through the United States Antarctic programme and aircraft were flying in from New Zealand every second day with documents and correspondence.

"We can still use the old fashioned letter contact," Ms Reid said.

Many of the staff had gone to the McMurdo station, she said, where they were setting up Hotmail email accounts.

Scott Base also had a satellite phone. They had no idea when the telephones would be restored.

"There is no deadline. We are told Telecom is working around the clock. We are totally dependant on them."

The editor of the Cook Islands newspaper, Moana Moeka'a, said while international phone calls were back, there had been difficulties with emails and the internet. Mr Moeka'a said the newspaper had not been able to access news services and banks were having problems with offshore transactions.

While some communications had been restored to the southern Cooks, the northern group was still down.

The American Samoa Telecommunications Authority yesterday reported it was still having difficulty with calls to the United States, and had no idea how long it would take to sort out.

Solomons Telekom continued to have problems with national calls to provinces from Honiara and receiving data on the internet.

Herald calls to Samoa were not connecting even though services were meant to be restored. A Telecom international phone operator said lines were overloaded.

Airlines servicing the Pacific reported that while the patchy telephone coverage was inconvenient, no flights had been delayed.

The Intelsat director of communications, Fritz Stollenbach, said the problems varied from island to island .

Some would be restored in a matter of days, others might take a week or two.

"There are going to be busy signals and delays, but slowly we will get it back."

Mr Stollenbach said it was a time-consuming process to find out what satellite frequencies were available to the islands and if their antennas were pointed in the right direction.

"Many islands pointed their dish to a certain orbital path over 20 years ago and didn't have to worry about other frequencies."

Intelsat's priority had been to ensure all critical telecommunications traffic was resorted immediately and then basic telephone services.

What happened

Power failure to Intelsat's IS-804 satellite left several Pacific Island countries cut off.

New Caledonia, Tahiti, Papua New Guinea and Fiji were affected but switched to alternative systems.

Partial services were restored to Tonga, American Samoa and Vanuatu yesterday.

Communication with Kiribati, Tuvalu and Tokelau has yet to be restored.

Telecom says all services should be back next week