Amalgamated Telecom Holdings (ATH) will comply if required by law to isolate or segment certain services on its telecommunication network, said ATH Group chief executive officer Ivan Fong as debate rages in Samoa over its government’s move to shut down services by American satellite broadband service provider Starlink.
ATH Group is present in Samoa through the Bluesky group of companies which includes Vodafone Samoa.
The ability of Samoans to access Starlink services in Samoa through kits purchased from Australia and New Zealand recently prompted Samoa’s telecom regulator to issue an order to ban the use of its equipment and services there.
The incident has drummed up calls for governments in the region to request Starlink to “geo lock” or “geo block” its service and limit it only to markets in which it has been licensed.
“I think this (geolocking) is a misnomer,” Mr Fong said.
“There are various reasons for geoblocking – for example, media content providers have geographically segmented and geoblocked content for decades now and they use this to maximise the revenues to the content providers and to manage the risk of privacy.
“Even on the various app store ecosystems, geoblocking is common – not every application is available to users in Fiji, for example.”
He said some countries who have not granted landing rights to various satellite constellations have required geoblocking over their countries for many years now.
“Even Starlink from the beginning has had different policies in how they deliver broadband to different markets, some of this is obviously due to regulatory compliance reasons for the markets they operate in, some for technical reasons and some for commercial reasons.
“I cannot speak for regulators, but as ATH has operations in a number of markets, we do have to comply with the legitimate requests and regulatory directions in each of the markets we operate in and in these markets the terms of our authorisation generally require us to comply with legitimate directives to isolate a service, parts of our network or the whole of the network.”
While Starlink now has the entire Pacific region covered through its constellation of satellites, it has so far been granted licenses to commercially operate only in Fiji, Papua New Guinea and a temporary license in Cook Islands.
