And that is one of the reasons that the satellite expert, David Hartshorn, secretary General of the Global VSAT Forum (GVF) is at the 24th annual meeting of the Pacific Telecommunications Council (PCT) in Honolulu.

GVF, a non-profit organization looking after communications needs worldwide, is, among other goals at the PTC conference, promoting a memorandum of understanding signed by a dozen or so Pacific region satellite service providers, suggesting liberalization of the regulations governing mostly government-owned satellite companies.

In an interview with Conference News Daily Hartshorn said "the capacity is already in orbit to directly meet public policy objectives in health, education and community communications.

What is stopping it use, he said are "legacy regulations designed to protect national services but which effectively inhibit their services."

Hartshorn said the "legacy" regulations that demand that national satellite services in various countries receive priority and protection for service in or out of their countries, stifle competition, encourage in-efficiency, and result in high prices, which in turn limit the use of the satellites by local and national public welfare organizations.

Hartshorn said some dozen national providers agreed last year on an "Asia Satellite Operators' memorandum of Understanding" which encourages countries to liberalize their regulations. The signers include some of the very countries that are protected, he said.

"We have already seen what happens when a country begins a progressive reform," he said. Accessibility, use and profit go up, he said.

He said that in India within a year of liberalization the numbers of regular satellite based internet users increased 12 fold in less than a year after liberalization and the record was almost matched in Nepal and Bangla Desh.

He said those nations were able, then, to use the services for medical information, educational courses and community ñbased communications even in remote areas, services were either not available or too expensive before the liberalization.

Hartshorn said that the legacy regulations in individual countries around the Pacific create a "honeycomb" effect in which interconnectivity is made difficult and expensive.

"If you are in a country you can look at that (nation's) satellite, but you could look at no other and we all know what happens in that situation. Prices are held artificially high, quality of services not encouraged as it is in a competitive environment,"

"That honeycomb effect -- walls throughout the region -- means that you can not provide a regional, cross border, wide area network application in the Asia Pacific. You can't do it.

"Let's say you have an office Bangkok and you have field sales offices in Hong Kong manila, Jakarta, Tokyo well there's walls in various of those locations and it means that you can't do the cross border (contact) via satellite.

"You are left with a lot satellite operators who are quote 'protected' quote when in fact they really what they are being protected from is being able to fully maximize the utilization of the resource that they paid hard currency for to get it into orbit," he said.

Therefore, Hartshorn said, GVF, and some of the signers of the memorandum of agreement, came to the PTC meeting.

"All of this begins at the national level, but it is essential that the deliberations begun at the national level is coordinated in a regional context. And PTC is an ideal setting for that type of dialogue to occur," Hartshorn said.

"And that," he said, " is why we are here."