Dr Mills and his wife Karina, who runs the International School, have lived in Enga Province since 2000. They have raised their family in the PNG highlands and consider Enga as home.
“When we arrived here we had to use HF radio to communicate so it was pretty isolating. If I sat there for half an hour I could send three emails or two of three lines each and they would go. This was our experience of modern day communications” says Dr Mills.
"Having good internet has been an enormous change for us and obviously running the International School and all the needs of the hospital, payroll system and running a modern hospital where you’re trying to do research, the internet has become increasingly important".
The Mills family heard about Lightspeed through Christian Radio Missionary Fellowship in Goroka and made the decision to install Lightspeed’s new VSAT product called Reach.
“Having good internet has been an enormous change for us and obviously running the International School and all the needs of the hospital, payroll system and running a modern hospital where you’re trying to do research, the internet has become increasingly important. This next step for us to have reliable, high speed internet is going to make an enormous difference particularly for the school because they haven’t had access to internet services until now.”
Lightspeed PNG designs, supplies, installs and supports networks and this instance deployed Kacific’s 1.2m Ka band satellite terminal to the site. Using Lightspeed’s own firewall, failover and hostpot solution, Centurion, Kompiam Hospital is able to manage and filter the internet being accessed at the site with remote support managed from Lightspeed Port Moresby and the satellite operations centre in Singapore.
Kompiam Rural Hospital, along with 10 other health centres and aid posts, is situated deep in the remote north of Papua New Guinea’s Enga Province, an area listed as one of the most disadvantaged in PNG. Jointly known as the Enga Baptist Health Services it is a ministry of the Baptist Union of Papua New Guinea. Kompiam has become a major training centre for overseas medical students, and has had a key role in the development of training for rural doctors in Papua New Guinea.
Lightspeed PNG is a Papua New Guinea internet service provider with fixed wireless services in Port Moresby and Lae. It also provides Ka band VSAT solutions nationwide along with hospitality TV and Guests Wifi solutions.