Air fares could go down this week, but what about ISP charges?

Both Domestic and International airfares could go down this week which is great news for the traveling public in Papua New Guinea. According to the NBC "Air Niugini, expects to reduce its international and domestic sector fuel surcharges" between the 5th and 10th of January 2009 but is currently awaiting International Parity Pricing. This is great news for all Wantoks out there that are planning to do some air travel in 2009, and with the current competition that Air Niugini is facing from Airlines PNG and Virgin Pacific Blue we could see a decent drop in air fares in 2009. This is also in line with the current global oil prices that may help make air travel affordable in 2009.

I for one am a great supporter of competition and as a consumer 2008 was good year for competition both in the airline industry (Air Niugini/Qantas Vs Airlines PNG/Virgin Pacific Blue) and telecommunications industry (Digicel Vs B Mobile). But what I am hoping for in 2009 is for ICCC to give the go a head for Telikom or one of its subsidiaries to become a Internet Service Provider(ISP). Then hopefully we will see some real progress in the reduction of the astronomical prices that Papua New Guineans are charged by local ISP's.

If you compare what people in Papua New Guinea are charge by ISPs to other countries in the region you feel totally ripped off. For example iPrimus Speedster 6GB plan (broadband wireless) for 6 Gigabytes of downloads per month was advertised in the December 2008 NetGuide issue for $39.95 per month. So for arguments sake lets say that the current PNG Kina to Aus Dollar is 0.5. That would mean that this plan would be K79.90 per month, with speed reduction after you go over your limit so there would be no extra charges. Now if you were to look at Daltron's entry level standard wireless plan 64k - 100. Meaning that you get a 64kb link and you are allowed to use 100 Megabytes before you are charged K0.50 for every excess Megabyte. For a monthly fee of K225, you don't have to be a maths professor to feel that you are being ripped off in a big way. To Daltron's defence I must admit that here in Papua New Guinea, currently we do not have a half decent communications infrastructure and Daltron buys their data wholesale from Telikom so they can not go any lower then what Telikom charge them.

With these arguments in mind I am thinking that it is time for competition to enter the ISP market place in PNG. To give all the grassroot Wantoks out there a fighting chance to be able to get affordable internet access. The PNG government should treat internet access as commoditiy that all Papua New Guinean's should have and not something for the privilege Wantoks out there. More funding is need to help reduce the cost of Internet access to help make it more accessible to the general public in Papua New Guinea.

Computer health check

Since it is the beginning of a new year why not start 2009 with a do it yourself service of your computer. Here is a list things that Wantok's with a Windows computer can do to service their computers:

Defragging your hard drive
I believe that it is important to defrag your hard drive every couple of months. So since it is the start of the year go through your hard drive and deleted files that you don't need or remove them to external storage like burning the files to a CD/DVD or putting them on an external hard drive. After doing this make sure that close all other programs. Then using the Windows defrag tool run a defragmentation of your hard drive. You can find the defrag tool in Accessories\System Tools\Disk Defragmenter. The reason why you defrag your hard drive is because over time your hard becomes disorganised with some files split into chucks and kept at different locations on the hard disk. Which means that when you try to access the file it takes you longer to access then if the file was stored in the same location on the disk. The whole defragmentation process takes a while so don't expect to be able to use your computer for a while when you start it.

Clean up your Cache
When ever a web page is loaded in your browser it will save ti to your hard drive. Which makes it faster to load the next time you visit that web page. But the Cache can become very large so you need to clean out your cache/temporary Internet files.

Run a Check Disk
I also suggest running a check disk to fix any corruptions that may have occur ed on your hard disk. To do this on a windows computer is quite simple. Click on your start menu and then click on run (to bring up the command prompt). Type in "cmd" and then click ok. Then a black command line screen will appear. Now type in the "chkdsk /f" and press enter. If a message comes up saying something like this volume is in use and chkdsk can not run.... would you like it to run on your next start up Y/N? type "y". What will happen is that the next time you start up your computer the check disk will run. So restart your computer and then a Windows message will appear saying that you schedule check disk to run if you don't want it to run press any key now. Leave it alone to run. I added in the "/f" option on these instructions so that it would fix any errors that are found during the check disk.

Run a Anti Virus Scan
It is also important to run a full system scan in safe mode to scan for any nasties that might have got into your computer over the last year, months, days, etc. There are a lot of great free anti virus software programs out there like AVG 8 - Free version which you can download and run for free. I recommend this free program I have being using it for the last 3 years and it has got rid of most of the nasties that I have encountered. There are a few that I have needed special removable tools for but that is a different story.

Run a Spyware Scan
Scan your computer for Spyware as well. Not only do these nasties collect information about you but they also take up valuable disk space and uses processing power. So you can run Windows Defender or another program like it that will remove Spyware from your computer.

Wantok's please note that I do not take any responsibility for any thing that you do to your computer.