Remote Islands and Rural Technology was the theme of a two-day Pacific Islands telecommunications workshop that was held at the International Dateline Hotel, Nuku'alofa, from September 29-30.

The workshop showed that providing rural and isolated islands with hi-tech communications remained a challenge for most telecommunication service providers in the region. Tonga was leading the way in making telecommunications available to rural and isolated islands by allowing two telecommunications companies to compete. The benefits of competition were the introduction of GSM mobile phones and a drop in the call charge rates.

The workshop was attended by representatives of telecommunications organisations from Melanesia, Micronesia, Polynesia, Australia, and New Zealand, along with suppliers of telecommunications equipment and services such as Intelsat, New Skies and Ericsson.

The Remote Islands and Rural Technology Workshop was one of three workshops that will be hosted by the Pacific Islands Telecommunications Association in conjunction with the Asia Pacific Telecommunity, the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre and the Prime Minister's Office of Tonga.

The other two workshops coming up are, APT-PITA Regional Information Communication Technology (ICT) workshop October 1-2, and APNIC Training, Internet resources Management Essentials workshop on October 3.