From the rugged highlands of Papua New Guinea to the remote islands of Tonga, a telecommunications revolution in the Pacific is helping ease poverty and isolation in some of the world’s poorest countries.

In just a few years, a wave of market liberalisation has put mobiles and laptops into the hands of millions in the region, with deep implications for business, health and education, and for avoiding earthquakes and tsunamis.

Farmers can now call ahead to check prices in local markets, villagers with no experience of banking can remit money using mobile services, and text alerts warn of giant waves whipped up by the region’s frequent earth tremors.

“They don’t have roads, they still don’t have, in a lot of cases, power, and all of a sudden they’ve got mobile telephones,” said Gavin Murray, of the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the World Bank’s private-sector arm.

“And anecdotally, it’s having a huge impact on society. It really doesn’t matter who you talk to, in most of these places they are all saying the access to mobile telephony has completely changed their lives.”

The sweeping change has been spearheaded by Irish company Digicel Pacific, backed by some 120 million US dollars in IFC loans, which has ventured into six of the island countries since 2006, with startling results.

Mr Murray said in two-and-a-half years, impoverished Papua New Guinea went from 100,000 mobile subscribers to nearly three million, while the central bank estimated the newly liberalised industry added more than half-a-percent to GDP.

Digicel Pacific chief executive officer Vanessa Slowey said call prices dropped by 60 per cent almost overnight in Samoa, the company’s first regional destination, where coverage leapt from just a third to more than 90 pe cent of the island nation.