The Ministry for Infrastructure, Transport and Communications expresses its concern at the consequences of the fault experienced in Go plc’s international connectivity link.

In an economy which is becoming increasingly service oriented and dependent on IT services, there can be no doubt that the current situation has a significant undesirable impact. It is to be noted that several connectivity-dependant organisations are equipped with international virtual private links and / or redundancy set ups via other telecom companies that have international links which are still operative.

The Ministry notes that Go has prioritised the limited international connectivity it continued to enjoy with international voice traffic carried on Go’s network diverted to the microwave and satellite links that were activated as soon as the problem arose. Furthermore, international voice traffic passing over Vodafone’s international submarine cable was not affected.

With regards to broadband, local sites suffered a drop in performance with no access to international sites.

The Ministry is also informed that credit card transactions could not go through for some time. Banks are equipped with dual connections and as such most financial transactions should have proceeded as normal. However some transactions are reported to have been affected.

The Ministry notes that the availability of an alternative international connection over the infrastructure owned by Vodafone has ensured that in spite of this grave fault Malta and Maltese businesses were not entirely isolated and could resort to alternatives. The availability of several options for international connectivity has been and continues to be a priority of the Government to ensure that any future accidents such as this one will have an ever lesser impact on the Maltese economy and information society.

As an island Malta will always be faced by risks of isolation. To address this the Government’s Smart Island strategy published in December 2007 recognises that “international connectivity is the lifeline of our digital economy. It is the fulcrum of our external environment and the highway on which the transformation of our industries are bound to travel.”

“In this context, without creating market distortions, we shall work with the telecoms providers to enhance Malta’s highways by aggressively pursuing the expansion of international connectivity on all counts with the aim of improving the resilience of this critical infrastructure.

“We shall follow an ambitious path to have more connections to mainland Europe (laid via alternative routes to the existing ones), North Africa and potentially to the Middle-East, landing in different locations and connecting to different nodes, hence establishing us as a real regional hub for electronic services.”

This effort has resulted in the drawing up of new fiscal incentives to assist private enterprise in investing in more connectivity in spite of the fact that the early promise of return on that investment may initially be uncertain. Those incentives are currently being discussed with the European Commission for clearance.

In any case Go itself in January 2008, following the publication of The Smart Island Strategy, was persuaded to announce the laying of a new cable which is currently underway and is expected to be on line within the present year. Melita Cable is also planning another international connection that will meet the target set out in The Smart Island Strategy to have four international connections by 2010.

This reduces nothing of the cost and inconvenience of the present reduction in connectivity. But the present experience is unfortunately justifying the Government’s past and present efforts to facilitate and aid with public funds the avoidance of its repetition in the future.

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