Telecom Directors pay visit

Telecom New Zealand International executives, Anthony Briscoe-General manager International and Nick Olsen-Group Controller, were hosted to a farewell party held at Café Salsa on Tuesday evening. The hosts were Jules Maher, CEO at Telecom Cook Islands and Mike Mitchell, chairman of the board with special guest, Prime Minister Jim Marurai who is also the Minister of Telecommunications.
Briscoe and Olsen paid a courtesy visit to Cabinet on Tuesday morning to deliver their pledge to government that TCI is committed to the Cook Islands. Cabinet were astonished to find that contrary to reports, TCI prices have been steadily reduced over the past few years. For instance, in comparison with say the Digicel claim of delivering calls at 16 cents per minute, TCI is already delivering international calls at 8.333 cents per minute to NZ with the capped rate of $5 per hour. As a matter of fact, In fact, your family and friends in NZ pay a much higher price to call you than you spend to call them back..
He concedes that internet speeds are not as speedy but that is because Cook Islands uses satellite and is not connected to fibre optic cable network as in Fiji and as planned for Noumea, Tahiti, Samoa, but which are prohibitively expensive eg NZ spent $1 billion to be connected to fibre optic.
However, there is an exciting new satellite technology being developed called O3B which is nicknamed ‘fibre in the sky’ and is capable of speeds similar to that of fibre optic. Internet giant Google and Europe’s biggest bank HSBC have thrown their weight behind a plan to provide cheap, high-speed Web access via satellite to millions in Africa and other emerging markets such as the Pacific.
Briscoe is no stranger to the Cook Islands having been part of the team that set up TCI in 1989. At the time, the Post Office and Cable and Wireless handled telecommunications (local and international) and the Prime Minister of that time, Sir Geoff Henry was keen to have Telecom NZ take over the operations. Briscoe recalls that others on the board at that time were John Scott, Trevor Clarke and Neil McKegg son of Boss McKegg the original owner of CITC.
TCI are here for the long haul and are forging ahead with preparing benchmarks for pricing and quality and providing excellent customer service. Briscoe said that at one stage, the Cook Islands was seen as a model for other Pacific nations in terms of telecommunication and he would like to see it recapture that spirit of responsive to the needs of customers. .