O’Brien says undersea Pacific cable could lead to the ‘death of distance’

Now that he owns, well, just about everything in business, Denis O’Brien is turning his mind to a growing number of ‘big picture’ issues. You could get bored counting all that lucre, right enough.

Last weekend, the Digicel chairman was in sunny Samoa to address the United Nations Small Islands Developing States (Sids) conference, where speakers also included Ban Ki-Moon, the UN's secretary general, and Rachel Kyte, vice president of the World Bank.

O’Brien had two big themes: technology and, a blast from Ireland’s recent past, debt forgiveness.

Firstly, he called for a public-private partnership to build a high-grade undersea telecommunications cable from Papua New Guinea across the Pacific Ocean to Sydney, Australia.

He suggested the cable could thread a slew of Pacific island nation states, such as Fiji and the Solomon Islands, and deliver top-speed broadband that would transform their economies.

“This cable would lead to the death of distance and bring this last geographic frontier into the global information age.

“It would become vital to the national economies of these islands,” said O’Brien.

It would also give companies in the region such as Digicel the ability to sell high-bandwidth fixed-line services, now that internet telephony operators such as Viber are allegedly eating its lunch.

He also said struggling Caribbean economies should get debt relief in exchange for economic reforms, following the model of the IMF-World Bank African HIPC (heavily indebted poor countries) initiative.

Kyte asked O’Brien to lead an exploration of the undersea cable project. Billionaires must keep busy.