New Caledonia is a French overseas territory in the South Pacific, about 1,500 km east of Australia. Like most of the islands in the region, it is not wired by an undersea telecommunications cable; instead, all of its Internet traffic comes courtesy of a satellite. Although ADSL Internet has been widely available in Nouméa, the capital city, for some time, due to the limits of a satellite connection and growing user demand, connections to the World Wide Web are often slow and unreliable. New Caledonia, despite being one of the most prosperous territories in the South Pacific, is a place where Linux magazines with cover CDs containing Linux distributions are still in high demand.
Sitting in a small outdoor restaurant in Anse Vata, a popular beachfront area of Nouméa, Bernard, myself and a few other Linux enthusiasts discussed the perils of being an Internet and Linux user in a distant and relatively isolated part of our planet. Of course, when you live on a breathtakingly beautiful island like New Caledonia's Grand Terre, with its healthy, pleasant climate, you probably won't want to spend as much time in front of a computer as when your domicile is in a crowded and polluted Asian megalopolis. Still, having fast, cheap and reliable Internet connection is not a bad thing....
I'll have a more detailed report about the meeting with Linux user community in New Caledonia in a few days at Linux.com. In the meantime, here is a discussion for this week's DistroWatch Weekly: are any of our readers located in small, isolated islands? If so, what is your Internet connection like? Do you get decent speeds and trouble-free downloads or do you rely on Linux magazines and online Linux CD shops to get your distributions? Is being a Linux enthusiast a costly hobby for you in terms of bandwidth? Please discuss below.
Finally, here is a year-on-year tabular comparison of interest in DistroWatch among the residents of the South Pacific islands, plus Australia and New Zealand. The figures in the 2006 and 2007 columns represent the total number of visits on the DistroWatch.com index page from each country or territory during the first seven months of each of the two years.
| Rank | Country | 2006 | 2007 | % Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | New Caledonia (NC) | 1,320 | 1,700 | +28.8% |
| 2 | French Polynesia (PF) | 1,922 | 999 | -48.0% |
| 3 | Fiji (FJ) | 70 | 275 | +292.9% |
| 4 | Niue (NU) | 4 | 79 | +1,875.0% |
| 5 | Vanuatu (VU) | 12 | 50 | +316.7% |
| 6 | Samoa (WS) | 12 | 24 | +100.0% |
| 7 | Solomon Islands (SB) | 9 | 13 | +44.4% |
| 8 | Cook Islands (CK) | 70 | 9 | -87.1% |
| Tonga (TO) | 8 | 9 | +12.5% | |
| 10 | American Samoa (AS) | 17 | 6 | -64.7% |
| 11 | Pitcairn (PN) | 2 | 0 | -100.0% |
| Tokelau (TK) | 1 | 0 | -100.0% | |
| Tuvalu (TV) | 4 | 0 | -100.0% | |
| Walis and Futuna (WF) | 4 | 0 | -100.0% | |
| Total | South Pacific | 3,455 | 3,164 | -8.4% |
| -- | Australia (AU) | 349,493 | 402,241 | +15.1% |
| -- | New Zealand (NZ) | 61,684 | 73,588 | +19.3% |
from : Distrowatch
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