Well, I'm not very happy with my Internet connection at the moment, primarily because every once in a while you really need the stupid thing to be working somewhat consistently ON instead of consistently NOT ON.

It seems from the failings that Tonfon's Internet caching thing-a-magic-cee is currently Internet caching thing-a-not-cee.

Argggghhh. And to think I was hoping a shift to TCC (the other ISP) just to be told by one of their customers of similar horror stories.

I love the new Tonfon website http://www.tonfon.to and it's real flashy and all, but you can quickly run out of interesting websites on the Tonfon network. I wonder if Tonfon actually pays someone to maintain their system ? Because that caching thing is sure giving me heart pain.

Of course, since I'm having problems with normal web traffic (http) as well as other Internet traffic such as FTP, and ssh (given up on doing POP3, SMTP to the outside world years ago) we can only surmise that there is a serious problem somewhere in the caves of the Tonfon NOC.

I sure hope Tonfon's new management intends to bring in management support personnel that can help in all fields or poor Internet users will be 2nd class citizens again.

The party's over, Everyone! Out of the Pool !!

Great to hear that the venerable board of the Tonga Communications Corporation, TCC, have pulled their finger out and made a decision (or non decision) about their future person in charge and decided to no longer need the services of their current Managing Director.

Great Idea Guys! Let's penny pinch now, so we can lose as much money as we can later. One of those rarefied air situations where it would be nice (or probably not) to taste the rationale (or not) that came up with that decision.

The environment.

Shoreline Communications Ltd, operators of the Tonfon Mobile Phone Service, Tonfon Internet and Tonfon TV (and I think some of those are making money?) have recently been sold to Digicel Pacific. How big is Digicel ? I don't know, but if you do a web search on "Digicel Tonga" you'll soon find that there are a lot of people who talk about Digicel who have just noticed Tonga?

About Digicel Pacific Limited

Since its launch in the Pacific in November 2006, Digicel has become the fastest-growing mobile operator in the Pacific with current operations in Samoa and Papua New Guinea, as well as commitments from the Governments of Fiji, Vanuatu and several other countries in the Pacific. Digicel is renowned for competitive rates, unbeatable coverage, superior customer care, a wide variety of products and services, and state-of-the-art handsets.

Digicel Pacific is a proud sponsor of several national rugby teams across the Pacific including; Fiji Rugby, Digicel Fiji Sevens, Digicel Pacific Islanders Rugby Team and the Digicel Pukpuks.

Digicel Pacific is a sister company to Digicel Group in the Caribbean, which launched in 2001 and is now the largest GSM provider in the Pan Caribbean region with 5.7 million customers and employing in excess of 3500 people.

Digicel Pacific, Digicel Tonfon should be expected to come in and changing what was a poorly run, nepotistic company with good equipment into a dangerous well oiled competitor.

Those family members sucking up the blood of the company will get a nice severance payout or join the ranks of yesteryears highly paid redundant IBM employees with guaranteed high wages performing meaningless demeaning work, how long could those fie'eiki's deal with mopping or cleaning the toilets?

Digicel Tonga will soon be a lean fighting outfit under good management and better technical support staff.

Fear for survival is always a good impetus for changing to the better.

In the meantime

Let's just "dump" our current General Manager?

Who needs a GM with pride in his workers ? Isn't that just a total waste of company time and resources instilling pride in your workers, to do good work, to meet and exceed customer needs? I've never met a palangi so supportive of his staff, and directing his staff to care about their customers out of concern for providing quality work, instead of fear of management. Who needs that ?

We don't need a GM who puts a priority on training both junior and senior staff? We don't need senior staff though technically capable but without management training, being sent on management training so they can be more effective and their teams more effective.

So long as the company is making a profit, let's not waste money on such trivial matters. The senior staff can supposedly deal with their incompetence, and workers below them can deal with leadership incompetence and poor quality output. Isn't that the norm we want?

Who needs a GM with visible evidence he cares about the country's future. I've only met up with this dude a couple of times, relating to his providing the country with free consultancy, free use of his experience, and free use of his expertise. Who needs such missionaries, not our TCC Board.

This obviously is a sad and not so isolated situation.

Best of luck to you Steve, and we the users of Telecommunications in Tonga wish you well in your next endeavors.

There have been a number of press advertisements regarding the proposed sale of shares in Tonga's larger Telecommunications business, TCC http://www.tcc.to. There are of course a lot of unanswered or untendered questions about the validity of holding shares in Tongan companies, as there is no liquid market for disposing of these shares and therefore brings to question whether one can really put a valuation of any shares.

This liquid market problem is the major problem banks have been having for years when people want to take out loans with their properties as security. Great, now the bank secures a $20,000 loan on a huge plot of land when only two or three people are likely to be interested in land that size, leading to banks having on their books sizeable amounts of property which they eventually have to let go to some enterprising person who snaps it up at less than the bank wants, but more than they've been getting.

The TCC expressions of interest lead us to a little experiment(?) last week, when driving through Houmakelikao you get a face full of telephone cabling that's just hanging across the middle of the road.

I'm about to pick up my TCC activated mobile phone to call TCC to report the problem when I thought this would be a good time to gauge a few things about this TCC Expressions of Interest.

How interested have TCC made their domestic customers, to report problems with their phone lines. How interested is the TCC infrastructure in resolving bleeding problems.

Monday morning and the cable has snapped, leaving one cable strewn across the road. Which, presumably means that either a TCC customer no longer has phone service, or they've been previously disconnected anyway, so no-one is interested in reporting the problem to TCC.

So, the cable that's supposed to be up high on the pole is now low enough that an enterprising 'hacker' can just take a machete to the whole thing and totally disconnect a lot more people. But I wonder if anyone will notice ?

Monday the 2nd week of the line being down, and the cable is still down. I guess, at least at Houmakelikao, there's less interest in TCC or is it the other way around ? TCC has less interest in Houmakelikao ?

[Edit: Changed IP address from 68.15.185.82 to reflect new server settings 68.98.213.178 as at 2007.06.13]

Tonfon seems to be having another problem with their servers again, which actually gives me more bandwidth (funny enough.)

How can that be ?

Your ISP generally provides as one of its services a machine that will translate your www.google.com type of addresses to the numerical (IP) addresses actually used by the machines. Now, both TCC and Tonfon have had problems with their machines doing this work (normally called a DNS Server.) But we're not talking about TCC here.

The problem that happens when the ISP's (Tonfon's) DNS Server doesn't work, is that although you are still connected to the Internet, you cannot really get to anything unless you already know that server/machine's numerical (IP) address.

For example: www.nomoa.com has a numerical address of 68.98.213.178 on the Internet. When your machine wants to talk to www.nomoa.com it actually asks the Internet what address www.nomoa.com  points to, and a response is provided of an numerical (IP) address of 68.98.213.178. Thus, your web browser asks onto the Internet to talk with the machine at address (IP) 68.98.213.178.

When your ISP's DNS Server is working properly, then it will respond to your question "what is the address of www.nomoa.com, so you can get to this website by typing www.nomoa.com, as you can always get to it with its numerical address of 68.98.213.178

When your ISP's DNS Server isn't working, you never get a responsess back from the DNS Server, and you cannot get to www.nomoa.com. When your web browser doesn't have a numerical address for www.nomoa.com it cannot go out on the Internet to ask for the web page. This problem occurs whether you use Internet Explorer or Firefox.

However, you can still get to the website if you type in the numerical address  http://68.98.213.178 because your browser can go out directly to the Internet  asking to the machine numerical address directly.

Now, the speed increase that I can get "intermittently" is because I know a few of the numerical addresses of the key sites I visit. So, when everyone else gets knocked off the Internet because Tonfon's DNS Server is down, I get all the available bandwidth my machine can suck down. Way Cooool.

Of course, if they fix the problem quickly then it's back to the old drudgery of sharing with everyone.

later, ...

Shoreline Communications Ltd, better known for their Tonfon brand, is on the hunt again for some good men or women with the technical skills to help handle two important posts:

• Security and Database Administrator
• Core Network Switching Engineer

The posts are quite technical, but if you think you have the skills please contact Shoreline's GSM Manager Mark Schmid ?  mschmid@tonfon.to (I think that's the Boss' name)

Strangely enough, I think I forwarded the resume for the perfect candidate for their Security and Database Administrator, but unfortunately they offered him the post of Core Network Switching Engineer. He took up a database job at the other telco (read: TCC)

As mentioned elsewhere, we need good people locally and especially in the companies that will help drive our economies forward (yes we even need good people in the church if you must ask, although I'm not sure how helpful they are with the economy [humour 8-) people ..])

The Shoreline IT house is quite eclectic (?) so for the above posts they have requirements for knowledge of different physical systems within their fields of interest. The IT House is heavily Microsoft centric but still employs a number of Unix boxes and non-Microsoft databases.

Aaaahhhhh, pulling my hair out kind of experience with the Internet this week.

1st, we've got a few seriously important email/communiques going between here and out there (not in Tonga.) Unfortunately, Tonfon's been doing some 'experimentation' and this week has hit the roof in poor infrastructure through their usually great service.

The Internet just went down for a good part of Monday, but it eventually came back up around noon. Tuesday, and it seems whatever their problems were, they've finally isolated it away from having their whole Internet down but only having ours down!!! Double aarrghhhhh!!!

It's kind of weird, because while cooking lunch I overheard Shoreline's advertising for some new bodies.

Good luck, because if the service gets any worse (as their mobile telephone service degraded to being useless for our cause) then the switching cost is minimal for most people (just that many of them don't know.) 

Got a call this morning from UCall (and I'm thinking "ok, what did I do now?? ")

It was someone from the "Ucall Customer Service" just calling to ask if I was having any problems with my new SIM card. They offer, free of charge, a Customer Service number: 0800-222.

That's not such a bad service, I haven't had any problems so I can't tell you how poor/good the actual support line is, but it's pretty impressive that they've called to let me know they are there to help.

Vodafone texts Australian customers, presumably because people are more receptive to that type of service (let alone scalability issues) but in Tonga that human voice sure helps with the 'comfort' factor.

Now I begin to feel that my choice of UCall for my new SIM card was a good idea after all. Now I just have to remember what my number is?  62-717, just call.

Oh, and that's Fe'aomoemanu doing her service bit serving the drinks on Saturday. Cool smile hey ?

I have the occassion to check out the pricing for mobile roaming. What I really need is a local (Australian) number for people to contact me while I'm in Tonga.

The only partnership that I know of to get this service is Tonga's TCC and Australia's Telstra service so I'm walking around their websites checking what the deal is (how and where, and when)

The short and tall of it is, if you intend to use your mobile phone in Tonga, just get out at the airport and buy yourself a local sim card. Making local calls is a lot cheaper and making international calls is a whole lot cheaper.

TCC is testing texting service between TCC uCall Mobile service and other providers (although I'd thought they said it was working a year or two ago) better news for all those Aussies and Kiwis is the news that they can take their Vodafone NZ or Telstra Oz mobiles with them to Tonga and answer/make calls.

[ref: http://www.tongaholiday.com/news/AAAAAAAAAATcc.php ]

TCC Makes it Easy

Visitors from Australia and New Zealand, will now be able to use their home mobiles whilst on holiday in the Kingdom of Tonga, thanks to a new Roaming service provided by Tonga Communications Corporation (TCC).

TCC is the first communication company in Tonga to commence inbound roaming services with both Vodafone New Zealand and Telstra Australia.

The roaming service will enable Vodafone NZ and Telstra Australia customers to visit Tonga and use their mobile handset as they do in their own country. Customers will continue to receive incoming calls, voicemail and text messaging as if they had never left home.

Director of Marketing and Deputy Director of Tourism Sione Moala-Mafi commented that, “this is good news for visitors who will now have a far more convenient way to keep connected while on holidays. Roaming customers will be able to keep their own mobile number instead of changing SIM card when they are in Tonga and will not miss any calls to their home mobile number. It is great to see Tonga being able to offer the same telecommunication services as other more technologically advanced countries.” 

TCC aims to add on other roaming partners later in the year.

The only problem with the above wonderful news is that TongaHoliday.com didn't date the release (although it comes before news with reference to September 10th and September 27th, so we're presuming September 2006 news?)

Now, if you must keep that Oz/Kiwi number open for people to call you, then you better just contact your telephony supplier before heading for the Kingdom so they can organise stuff.

But, if you intend to make a lot of phone calls I think you best consider getting yourself a uCALL SIM card when you land in Tonga, unless price is no object to you.

An aside: Texting within Tonga was not working between TCC's uCall and Shoreline's Tonfon service in July 2006, so maybe they can get that working too. (smile)

Too bad my vodafone phones are in Australia, not New Zealand. And the only other mobile phone supplier SIMs I have are optus. Man, I'm out of luck. Wierd hey ? 8-)

I've been a @gmail user since I could get an invite. The main reason for moving there, was simply to get an International email address that I can travel with, but more importantly an email address that I can send/recieve messages using a desktop client.

I've used a bunch of different desktop clients, notably: Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, Mozilla Thunderbird, and now Windows Mail (with Vista) and Windows Live Mail Desktop (Beta).

The Big News.

Windows Live Mail Desktop (Beta) together with a registered Windows Live ID now lets you download your @hotmail.com and your @nomoa.com mail messages.

As I understood it, you previously could only download your @hotmail.com messages if you had signed up as a paying customer with Microsoft Hotmail. Fine. Unfortunately, there was no chance in Hell of living through the webmail from Tonga. It's slow enough, no one needs the additional pain. So, after using samiuela@hotmail.com as my primary "international" email address, it got dumped quickly when Google offered gmail which let me download my mail messages to my desktop.

With WLMD, and a registered (join the Beta @ http://ideas.live.com) you can get that same work on my desktop. I can now read my samt@nomoa.com mail messages without logging onto the web (which is why some people used to get very slow responses from that account.)

WLMD allows checking email from Google GMail as well, so the benefits of both worlds.

I only wish that WLMD would have allowed all incoming mail to go to a single INBOX and sort out (without my hand holding) which account to use for responses by itself.

Voice over IP, the old new technology to provide better services (in part cheaper) on voice/phone calls.

Unfortunately, after spending a little time researching on and off, over the past two years, it seems that it is conclusively obvious. Getting a phone card is going to save you a whole lot more money calling Tonga, than getting VoIP working.

I'm not bothering much with other destinations, I am only interested in getting cheaper calls in and out of Tonga. At this moment, I can get "Click Africa" phone cards that gives me something like AUD$ 0.25 a minute to Tonga, whereas on the four VoIP services I've checked so far, they are charing approximately AUD$ 0.46 a minute.

The local calls (within Australia) are real cheap, although looking at our phone bill over the past two months of residency, we don't make that many local phone calls anyway.

The dilemma of what to do with renewing or dumping a this Optus Home Phone plan.

High Speed Internet Connections that uses Wireless and Existing Phone line (Wireless & Non-Wireless).

A: Wireless Internet is point to point wireless high speed internet access that uses radio technology.

B: Non Wireless Internet uses existing fixed line to deliver high speed internet access.

A:“DATA ANYWHERE” offers accounts with speeds that can be 10 times faster than dial-up access and even higher speeds available.

A: No, “DATA ANYWHERE” wireless operates on a TCC owned wireless network that is totally separate from the local phone company. And doesn’t require a phone line A: Yes, If you located within the “DATA ANYWHERE” coverage area of ADSL, then you uses phone lines installed at your location can be used for simultaneous connections - Talk on the phone and surf the Internet at the same time on the same phone line.!

Q: Can I connect more than one computer at a time with “DATA ANYWHERE” Internet Connection?

A: Yes, with a properly configured Ethernet Router, multiple computers can surf the Internet simultaneously. For your convenience, “DATA ANYWHERE” can install the appropriate router to fit your individual needs.

Q: What equipment do I need to use “DATA ANYWHERE”?

A: An Ethernet ready Windows PC or Mac. Other Ethernet ready computers will work but may require customer configuration to connect.

Q: How can I get “DATA ANYWHERE” Internet access?

A: Call (676) 20-053 or 20-093 and a “DATA ANYWHERE” representative will schedule a personal consultation with you to determine if you can utilize “DATA ANYWHERE” at your location.

Note: Full Rates are available online @ http://www.tcc.to

Visit bTonga

[update: sorry, had to vau the niu so left a few things out]

TCC took guests to Fafa Island to demonstrate and announce the release of their new product Broadband Data Anywhere with the following highlights.

Title: TCC Data Anywhere Service

Service: Broadband Internet through Copper, Fibre, or Wireless depending on your needs.

The Numbers

As a nation, we're not too well connected, even though there are a number of known, practical, achieveable social and economic benefits to being online.

• 4% of Population have access to broadband
• 15% of Population have access to the Internet
• 16% of Population have access to computers

The Prices

It's so cheap, that if you are a business and already have a Tonfon service, you'd be crazy not to just have one of the cheapest solutions from TCC as a backup system.

• Expect 75% savings on current charges
• Sample: 64k down, 32k up is $99.00 per month
• Buy the equipment up front ($500) and get a discount to $67.00 a month
• Signup for THREE years and get a further discount
• Prices exclude Consumption Tax
• Unfortunately Audio presentation does not present the full price list (seemingly displayed in the live presentation) Brochures available, but not online as yet.
• Installation is cheaper at $100 or $80 for existing customers.

What else ?

Availability ? Immediate, signup and keep begging that someone actually comes to the house. I wonder if anyone has copies of all those forms people filled out to get leased lines and have since disappeared in the hallowed halls of the TCC Fongoloa Head Quarters ? [Obviously I'm a little too late here since I'm still paying my phone bill but getting my Internet elsewhere]

WIFI Hot Spots. The General Manager alludes to hot spots for cafes which sounds like a great attraction in future.

Visit bTonga

Reading some stuff on the Internationa Telecommunication's Union, and I'm surprised to find out that Shoreline Communications aka Tonfon is not listed as a Recognised Operating Agencies (ROA.)

Recognized Operating Agencies (ROAs) - http://www.itu.int/ITU-T/inr/roa/

The status of ROA is used within certain ITU-T Recommendations, e.g. E.118, E.164.1, E.169.1, E.169.2, E.212, Q.708, X.121 as a criterion regarding assignment of international numbering resources. Such a list would assist in the administration of international numbering resources and would facilitate the exchange of information between ROAs, for example, on numbering changes.

The term "Recognized Operating Agency" is defined at number 1008 of the Annex to the Constitution of ITU as:

Any operating agency, as defined above [see below], which operates a public correspondence or broadcasting service and upon which the obligations provided for in Article 6 of this Constitution are imposed by the Member State in whose territory the head office of the agency is situated, or by the Member State which has authorized this operating agency to establish and operate a telecommunication service on its territory.

The term "Operating Agency" is defined at number 1007 of the Annex to the Constitution of ITU as:

Any individual, company, corporation or governmental agency which operates a telecommunication installation intended for an international telecommunication service or capable of causing harmful interference with such a service.

What does this mean ? At least for the moment, it seems to only indicate that Government has not been updating ITU information per circulars sent out to each country, and ITU have some really old information in their databases (read: Cable & Wireless stopped operating in Tonga a long time ago?)

Visit bTonga

IAX is a VOIP Protocol designed by the folks at Digium, developers of the Open Source Asterisk PBX/VoIP Server.

As invariably every six months I have to try and track down the clients for IAX2, I thought I might as well add a list here. Asterisk/Digium releases a set of libraries for people wishing to develop interoperable software, and below is a list of applications using another FOSS library http://iaxclient.sourceforge.net

IAXClient is an Open Source library to implement the IAX protocol
used by The Asterisk Software PBX

Projects Using IAXClient

• iaxComm: a GPL softphone built using IAXClient and wxWindows.
  • Runs on Microsoft Windows, Mac OSX, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris.

• DIAX: From the home page:
  • "This is a full featured and very small (less than 100KB for all the files) IAX based software phone for Microsoft Windows platforms (only).
    The application is distributed as a freeware for personal use."

• IaxPhone: another GPL softphone built using IAXClient. Written in VB6.

• IDEFisk: Another Windows softphone from asteriskguru.com

• KIAX: A QT-based softphone

Why use the IAX protocol, and not SIP or H.323?

While asterisk does support SIP, and can be made to support H.323, the IAX protocol has some inherent advantages over these protocols, because it is small and simple.  Also, since it uses just one UDP port-pair for both media and control, it is much simpler to use in environments where NAT is is use, or with network tunneling.

Visit bTonga

TCC is promoting that they now provide Wireless Broadband connectivity, together with their previous Broadband offerings xDSL and ADSL (I guess they've finally dropped their vaunted ISDN?)

Apart from the fact that the solution to poor service is not new equipment, the current experience at Tonfon's Premium Broadband Service (my monica) should be a warning on the need for redundancy for TCC.

The Tonfon Premium Internet Customers are offline and the alternate service through Tonfon is not readily interchangeable. Operating two separate wireless services, one for premium (i.e. pay more money, get guaranteed better service) customers and regular customers (i.e. get aggregate good service) Tonfon's Premium Equipment has been very solid (the one we have over at http://www.cafe.afe.to and http://www.tbu.to has been running without need for physical replacement, repair (any of that stuff was possible across the wireless by Tonfon staff.)

Visit bTonga

The Tonga Broadcasting Commission has not only got themselves a new Site banner, but they've also moved house.

Wandered over to their house today to notice that they've completed moving from their old home http://www.tbc.to to a new home at http://www.tonga-broadcasting.com. Not only have they moved 'virtually' but they've also moved from their previous service provider, seems strange at face value being that www.tbc.to should be a free domain name for them (government institute) as well as with a direct relationship (DNS) to the Kingdom of Tonga.

The English news is still getting regular updates, and the Tonga Language news gets worse, in anycase go visit the new Tonga Broadcasting Commission Website.

Visit bTonga

February 19th, phone line is still down after official visit from TCC staff (noted in previous post.) Fast forward to April 17th and guess what's happened.

• After eight more problem reports
• Phone line is still not recabled/connected.
• The phone service is disconnected by TCC for non-payment of bills?
• TCC is running massive advertising campaign to resign/sign on new customers.
• Even if our neighbour pays for the phone line to be reconnected, the cables are still laying on the grass, so they'd have to pay and then continue to wait for the line to get fixed (ooops, this has happened to us so there's nothing surprising here.)

I need to get in touch with the neighbour and I'd forgotten 'Amelia's mobile number so I just call their landline to find out that the number has been disconnected. Wow?? I find her later in the week to be told that she doesn't know what's happened because it still is not on yet, so she's surprised that it got disconnected without having been connected anyway.

Visit bTonga

9:10 am and we can't connect to get email again. This time, the webmail fails and so does using POP (i.e. using your normal email client like Outlook Express)

9:15 am I've tried a number of different things to ascertain, make sure that it is a problem with connecting to TCC's email server and not something else on my machine.

9:17 am We call TCC and get a good receptionist who gets me through to a human in their Internet Service (and that's a tough job since I've been in that office and have heard the phone ringing like it was going to break off)

TCC Rep: "Va'a Internet"

<<note no name mentioned, ownership of the customer or any other generally held good customer service answering technique>>

Me: Hi, I can't seem to connect to your email service either through my email client or through your website. Can you tell me if there is a problem?

TCC Rep: Wait. "Tali mai"

<<pause>>

TCC Rep: Try back in 10 minutes.

Me: Thank you.

Visit bTonga

TCC is responsive, whether it was reading my post earlier, or that they are just on the ball.

Less than half a day after the previous post, TCC's Webmail, is working again.

Thanks TCC.

Visit bTonga