Tonfon Communications increased its wireless capacity last week to cope with a rapidly growing demand for bandwidth by Tonga's internet users.

Since November 12 Tonfon has secured additional bandwidth from a second satellite, to relieve its overloaded wireless internet and mobile phone service.

Mark Schmidt, Tonfon Communications General Manager said last week, that "by transferring a fair majority of our customers on to a different satellite we have managed to free up our bandwidth and the result so far is looking very positive.

"It's a fairly technical solution, and we are still in our testing mode, but we are trying to diversify our satellite network to ensure quality so at the end of the day the customers are getting what they paid for," he said.

High demand

Siaosi Koloamatangi, Tonfon...’s Marketing Manager said that they did not think that they would need more bandwidth so soon, "but the growth of local businesses has been so fast and the demand so high that we had to get extra capacity to supply their needs.

"About 80 percent of the local businesses are using our internet service, including most Government Ministries.

"Our mobile phones service is working off the same satellite so we have to juggle the two to make sure that we don't sacrifice one for the other."

Siaosi said that during the past month when it was clear there was not enough capacity to go around, they did not encourage new installments because of the constraints, and they did not want to overload the system too much until they identified a solution.

"The main thing is quality, and our strategy over time is to provide a quality service....”

Mark however, wanted to stress that their new faster service will be in its testing mode, for a few more weeks to make sure it is stable and after that it will be ready to go.

"But our customers have seen the advantage with the faster speed and we are quite confident to experience growth in the next 12 months," he said.