Fiji Islands

Who offeres Internet Bandwidth in Fiji Islands (Lautoka and Yaqara)?

Hell... who needs help doing any sort of work over there??? I'd love
to find a way to bind work and vacation spots together! :slight_smile:

Scott
Twitter: @ScottMorrisCCIE
E-mail: swm@emanon.com

Knowledge is power.

Power corrupts.

Study hard and be Eeeeviiiil......

Connect is your best bet http://www.connect.com.fj/

Unwired is also a local competitor but I am not sure if they have coverage in Yaqara. Lautoka is a business district so you can get connectivity there from Connect and Unwired but Yaqara you might be quite limited since its a rural area.

Send me a message if you need introduction to folks, I am still connected to some local telco and network engineers there.

Zaid

In no particular order

Connect.com.fj aka tfl.com.fj
Fintel.com.fj
Vodafone.com.fj (via a 3G stick)
Digicel.com.fj (via a 2G stick, but also via a wireless backbone network)

If you want to do BGP or IPv6, good luck!

Is that for Fiji Water? :wink:

These people have very good operational Internet experience in Fiji.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/timothyverma
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/alfred-prasad/0/409/14a
http://au.linkedin.com/in/skeeve

It looks like Fintel and TFL are both providers for Southern Cross
cable. That would be your best bet if they can get lines out to you.

Otherwise, there's always VSAT, but that brings a set of other issues with it.

Ping me offlist if you want more detail on the VSAT stuff.

Fintel and TFL sleep in the same bed essentially. Fintel is the gatekeeper of the southern cross cable protected heavily by the local government, your typical monopoly setup. Connect is a business unit of TFL. I think you can do the math there.

Fintel does not do BGP out of the country (or didn't the last time I was there). Forget VSAT, waste of time.

Zaid

VSAT *isn't* a waste of time if you're willing to spend the money.

But that, of course, is the key point. Quality VSAT service costs a
LOT of money (3k-5k per asymetrical megabit). Plus, a quality
provider will have no problem providing you with BGP.

And you need a license to operate VSAT in Fiji (as well as to operate an
ISP), which is near impossible to get on the mainland, as TFL can provide
you the service you require.

For SCC, FINTEL and TFL have direct access to SCC. Tho last time I looked,
TFL peering is not very good.

FINTEL: http://bgp.he.net/AS9241
TFL: http://bgp.he.net/AS45349

And there is the University of the South Pacific which is not a provider
of any Internet Service
http://bgp.he.net/AS24390

The fun part of all of that, is that the interconnection of these 3 AS is
done overseasŠ FAIL!

VSAT is resold by Telecom Fiji so you are not going to get anything different than the Telecom Fiji experience with the added bonus of very few folks using VSAT in the country and Telecom FIji doing a poor job of operational support of VSAT. I considered VSAT 12 years ago for connecting the university medical network I built there but setting aside costs there was really no competence from Telecom Fiji to manage this service. If something breaks in the earth station a VSAT tech is flown from Australia and it can take weeks to fix anything.

My suggestion is to work with Connect folks and explore redundancy from either vodafone or digicel as Franck suggested. My experience there has been building networks in Suva, Lautoka, Nadi. Skeeve can give more advise for all the fun building in the resort Islands :slight_smile:

Zaid

Zaid, Franck: Thanks for the clarification. I forgot to take into
account politics.

I suppose it's impossible to obtain a VSAT license if you're
transmitting to an out-of-country teleport?

The technical support side isn't that difficult if you've got
reasonable intelligent people onsite along with spares of
*everything*.

It is not impossible but you have to prove the current providers cannot provide you the service. Some resorts in remote islands use VSAT.

To be noted O3B could be a solution too.

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