Fourteen coastal centres in Papua New Guinea (PNG) are expected to benefit from better access to internet services when Chinese technology vendor Huawei completes a national broadband transmission network in the country, local press outlet The National reports, citing comments made by Huawei Australia corporate affairs manager Geeke van der Sluis. With Huawei having been contracted to assist with the construction of Papua New Guinea’s National Transmission Network (NTN), which will stretch for 5,457km, it is understood that the coastal locations that will gain improved connectivity are: Vanimo, Wewak, Madang, Lae, Popondetta, Alotau, Kerema, Daru, Kimbe, Kavieng, Kokopo, Lorengau, Arawa and Port Moresby. With regards to the start of work, Mr van der Sluis was cited as saying: ‘According to our headquarters in China, the project will start deployment in the second quarter of this year.’
Meanwhile, Paul Komboi, managing director of PNG DataCo – the company responsible for overseeing the construction of the NTN and acting as a non-discriminatory provider of telecommunications transmission services over the infrastructure – said that the new system was very important to the country as it not only includes a new submarine cable network but also internet gateways and data centres. ‘This will improve the whole information communication technology infrastructure in the country and greatly increase network coverage, capacity and the availability of internet and broadband services to end users,’ he said. With the designed capacity of the system reported to be 8Tbps, on completion the NTN will cover 55% of the population and provide more than 70% of the country’s domestic bandwidth requirements, the report notes.