From Satellite Struggles to Starlink: Inside Solomon Islands’ Internet Access Revolution
The Coral Sea Cable System is a 4,700 km submarine fiber‑optic link completed in late 2019 and brought online in 2020, connecting Solomon Islands to Papua New Guinea and Australia with an initial 200 Gbps capacity and up to 20 Tbps total. Since going live, the Coral Sea cable has allowed ten times more data at the same price for users in Honiara and provincial capitals. Our Telekom launched 4G/LTE in Honiara in 2017, Bmobile-Vodafone followed around 2018, and by 2025 4G is present in parts of Guadalcanal, Malaita, Western, and Choiseul, with 50 remote villages lit in 2024–2025 via