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.

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 ?

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.

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 ?

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-)

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.

[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, ...

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.) 

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.

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.