Cable Outage Sees Tonga Fall Back To Satellite Internet (zdnet.com)

The subsea cable providing Tonga, a country in the South Pacific Ocean, with broadband, the Tonga Cable, has been out since 20:30 local time on Sunday night, with the nation now relying on satellite internet instead. From a report: Provided by Kacific, the nation's digital connection to the outside world is now a Ku-band satellite accessed through local ISP Ezinet. Tonga Cable Director, Paula Piveni Piukala, said Kacific is working to boost internet and voice capacity for priority communications. "We appreciate Kacific's assistance, as Tonga currently has no other internet or mobile phone connectivity to the outside world," Piukala said. "Kacific's satellite service ensures that essential services can be maintained as we work to resolve the issue."

Comments

Re:Fragile network

[Anonymous Coward]

"For a network that was originally designed to be redundant and robust in case of nuclear war,"

Yes, over the ground for the United States.

"there are large parts of the internet that have remarkably fragile connections "

Yes, small poor countries in the middle of the ocean. They have Ku satellite connections now.

A nation of cord-cutters

[sinij]

Entire nation of Tonga proudly joined the ranks of cord cutters.

Too soon?

The entire nation of Tonga

[Spencer Drager]

From Wikipedia... The entire nation is ~100k people. 70% live on the main island. 32 fiber strands connected Tonga to Fiji. I'll wager the 70k on the mainland had better internet than most in the US before this cable cut.

Re:Fragile network

[guruevi]

The network wasn't built to be robust or redundant, it was designed to be cheap to install, decentralized and remain usable during war. The redundancy came in the form of physical structures and weapons, the network just had to be able to continue working if an entire segment disappeared.