Inside Vanuatu’s Digital Leap: How Satellite Internet Is Transforming Island Connectivity
Vanuatu is a Y-shaped archipelago of roughly 80 islands with a population of about 330,000, of which nearly 74% live in rural areas. A 7.3-magnitude earthquake in late 2024 severed Vanuatu’s sole international submarine cable, the Interchange Cable Network (ICN1), causing a nationwide internet outage. The ICN1 is a 1,280 Gbit/s submarine fiber cable connecting Port Vila to Suva, Fiji, and its 2014 launch expanded national bandwidth by more than 200x. A second international cable, SMART TamTam, is under development to link New Caledonia to Vanuatu and is expected online around 2025, providing redundancy and climate-sensor capabilities. Since the 2014