Tonga has been but cut off from the internet last week, as an undersea cable connecting the archipelago to the wider world was damaged on January 27. This led communications across the tiny and isolated country into chaos. According to cable’s owner, a ship’s anchor may have caused the outage.
The outage damaged overseas phone calls, money transfers, airline bookings, and university enrolments. Specifically, Reuters reports that in the capital, Nuku’alofa, a satellite dish was mounted to provide a slow connectivity. This made hundreds of people to queue outside a government telecom office, to receive a more reliable signal.
The problem showcased the vulnerability of undersea fibre-optic cables, which include data-carrying capacity about 200 times that of satellites. Because of this, they have become the backbone of global communications. Before this incident, damaged cables left Somalia without internet for weeks in 2017 and cut off parts of Egypt and India in 2008.
Tonga’s cable was severed in two spots within about 10 km of Tonga’s its on January 27. Reuters cited Paula Piveni Piukala, director at cable owner Tonga Cable Ltd, as saying that a repair ship was about to leave from Samoa and could be able to fix the problem in a week or two, based on the weather.
