Results for Communications

The Cable Ship Lodbrog successfully retrieved the southern end of the damaged domestic submarine cable on Wednesday. Tonga Cable Ltd. told Matangi Tonga today that work is underway to reconnect the cable today, to restore fibre optic communications to the northern groups of Vava'u and Ha'apai.

Tonga's local telephone and internet service providers, Tonga Telecommunications Corporation (TCC) and Digicel are using satellite links to restore their services to the two outer islands groups, with hopes that the domestic submarine fibre optic cable might be fixed in the next few weeks. The cable ship CS Lodbrog is expected to arrive in Tongan waters on Wednesday.

The damage assessment on Tonga's domestic submarine fibre-optic cable will be delayed by at least a week, while the repair ship has stopped in Fiji, Tonga Cable Ltd said today. The ship was supposed to depart yesterday and arrive in Tonga today to assess the damage to the cable that blacked out on 29 June.

Last Tuesday 9 July, Tonga's communications Regulator, MEIDECC, notified Starlink, the global satellite internet network, to cut off all services to its roaming subscribers across Tonga's land and seas. The government will not allow the use of Starlink in the current ongoing communications crisis in Tonga, because they have not given Starlink's fixed broadband services a license to operate here. The regulator is not allowing the roaming services either, after the nation's domestic fiber optic cable failed on 29 June. “With understanding of the inconvenience, at the same time the law cannot be put aside just because you have slow internet,” the Prime Minister told Starlink users yesterday, many of whom had raised safety concerns.

A total communications failure on Tonga's only inter-island domestic submarine cable has disrupted normal telephone and internet services to the outer islands since 29 June and it is likely to be several weeks before it is known how long it might take for normal services to be restored. In the meantime, the local providers are running on low bandwidth satellite links with limited capacity. It is Tonga's third major internet outage, following the severely disruptive national and domestic cable blackouts in 2019 and 2022.

The Tonga Government is considering issuing Starlink a licence to offer broadband internet services in Tonga. The Prime Minister Hon. Hu'akavameiliku told a media briefing last week that Starlink had applied for a licence to operate in Tonga, and they were taking it into consideration.

Over 100 VHF digital portable transceivers were set up for Tonga Police, by the Australian Federal Police (AFP), through Tonga-Australia Policing Partnership (TAPP), to build the radio communication network capability of Tonga Police.

The Chief Secretary and Secretary to Cabinet, Mr Paula Ma’u represented Tonga in supporting of disaster early warning signs, at an “Early Warnings for All" panel discussion, held on 20 September, in New York.

Repairs on the domestic submarine cable system connecting Tongatapu to Ha’apai and Vava’u were completed and back in service on Wednesday night, 12 July, after it was destroyed by the Hunga-Tonga Hunga-Ha’apai volcanic eruption in January 2022. Over 108 kilometers of cable was used for the repair.