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I just saw this note on the roaming section of the Vodafone NZ website:
”Due to a fire in the Cook Islands, international roaming is currently unavailable there. Local vendor teams are working to restore services as soon as possible. We recommend you contact your resort to find out what local services are available.”
A rather curious situation. On further investigation I see the situation was caused about three weeks ago by a fire a the HQ of Blue Sky (the local telecommunications provider).
I head that the Cook Islands may get a fibre run from one of the new submarine cables – can remember where I read it, but that would be a game changer for their communications
Saw the fire incident a while ago but just noted this on traveltalk now.
I was told they have a boat arriving with new bits and bobs in December. Apparently bluesky is run from Samoa despite a local wanting the contract! In the interim you can use their hotspots which – well, aren’t created equal and there are definitely dead zones. I think 1.5GB for $25 for maybe 7-14 days?.
Pre-fire I was quite impressed with the service. Very few and short phone calls, mainly used internet but pretty fast.
Post-fire if you have an old bluesky Sim card you can top up and use that for data although some of the more recent SIM cards have issues. I have an old iPhone 4 and they weren’t able to provide me with a SIM card for that particular phone pre fire. They currently aren’t selling new SIM cards as they can’t activate them so hotspot access is the only thing on sale currently.
Both the current hotspot mode works in Aitutaki as well as the pre-fire Wifi data plan.
As a side note I found the Wifi via the $49 / 3GB great. Just turned off all the unnecessary data usage. I don’t even think I used all of it. Was quite surprised at the number of people that didn’t do their homework and obtain some sort of plan while exiting Raro airport.
Correct, their network core was damaged by a fire. They have restored partial local services (voice and text) by leveraging Bluesky Samoa’s network. I believe voice and text services are unable to be billed for so are free for existing local sims. They are also unable to add new sims so visitors cannot purchase local sims.
Wifi services have been partially restored.
All roaming services are unavailable and will be for sometime as we need to wait until the network is fully restored as well as billing systems. Latest update we received was early Jan.
Updates available on their facebook page. https://www.facebook.com/BlueskyCookIslands/
The rebuild is significant to say the very least.
Andrew Bluck
Manager of Roaming – Spark
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