By Staff Reports
(Maui)- The Mayor’s Office of Economic Development (OED) announced that it has executed a contract with the Applied Research Laboratory at the
University of Hawaii to evaluate, develop and recommend a preliminary telecommunications strategy for Maui County. The study begins on the premise that Maui County is falling further behind the broadband curve, with demand increasing exponentially each year.
“We are always working to be less reliant on tourism,” said Mayor
Alan Arakawa, “Making sure we have high quality, accessible broadband available for our community is critical. Broadband is needed for everything from banking, job searching, shopping and an ever-increasing demand for streaming video. We need to plan for this growth.”
“We see broadband access as one of the most critical barriers to diversifying our economy,” said Teena Rasmussen, Director of OED,
“We are already 2500 miles from the mainland US, and now we are isolating ourselves even more by falling behind in the telecommunications arena. We see this study as a first step to creating a comprehensive action plan on how we can solve this.”
The study will be conducted by Joel Ogren, formerly of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. Ogren recently completed a comprehensive study for the State of Hawaii DBEDT to provide alternatives for consideration of potential new landing sites for broadband undersea fiber-optic cable stations to be built in Hawaii.
Recent technological advances in fiber-optic cable have taken away the need for a cable from Asia to the mainland US to stop in Hawaii for a power boost. Because Hawaii is such a small market, the cable companies have little or no incentive to bring a link to Hawaii.
Hawaii is further disadvantaged as its undersea telecommunications cables are rapidly coming to the end of their useful life.
“We must make it attractive for these private telecommunication consortiums to put Maui County in their cable network,” said Mayor Arakawa.
A recent article in Pacific Business News listed the Broadband speed in Wailuku at 17.32 Mega Bits Per Second. The Fastest City in the world is Hong Kong at 106.84 MBPS.
“The holy grail is 1 Gigabit-per-second (GBPS),” said Rasmussen, “We should strive to bring that to every household in Maui County. Job diversification would flourish, and our sister islands of Molokai and Lanai would have a global advantage unlike any other rural, isolated area. We want to ask the community to think about what they would do with 1 GBPS?”
The broadband contract will be complete within four months, and a full report will be posted for public viewing at mauicounty.gov/oed. For more information about the study contact the Mayor’s Office of Economic Development at 270-7710.