Locke, representing Minerva Networks, is flogging equipment at the 24th annual meting Pacific Telecommunications Council (PCT) to attempt to help telephone companies compete with cable companies.

The equipment Minerva makes enables telephone companies to send live and interactive television pictures over existing telephone lines. Cable companies for years have been spreading into the voice and data transmission business, thus cutting into the telephone companies' traditional markets.

And telephone companies are what they have at the annual PCT meeting, scores of them.

"I am very impressed with the level of interest, " said Locke.

"In many ways the problems and opportunities in the Pacific and South Pacific areas are very similar to those in rural America, " he said.

Locke said the edge in converting telephone and data services to television as well, will probably go to the smaller telephone companies who can act faster than huge national monopolies.

"Large telecos traditionally move very, very slowly," he told The Earth Times. "But the little ones can move rapidly.

Minerva, a Santa Clara, California-based company took advantage of the PTC convention to announce that it had signed a deal with Midwest Telnet to provide service to some 21,000 telephone subscribers in rural Wisconsin.

The contract, like others Minerva has signed in South Korea, China, Hilton Head South, Carolina and Chile, will provide the subscribers with several dozen, and potentially unlimited, channels of high quality digital television, video-on-demand (VOD) and pay-per-view (PPV), as well as email and Internet access.

Minerva claims to be the only company in its field making all the software and all the hardware necessary to help telephone companies get into the TV business. Although he is in Honolulu to help telcos battle cable encroachment, he is not adverse to pointing out to potential customers that cable companies themselves by some of the company's equipment that help viewers have truly interactive access to TV content providers.

"Ours is the fastest and most cost efficient," he said.

So fast, and so interactive, he said, that the company is about to sign a contract to provide touch-screen, interactive, full motion video to Wall Street traders, an industry group, who in the pursuit of information, are not known for their patience.