Thread by @dailypostdan

I don’t think this is fundamentally wrong on the facts, but I’d argue for a different understanding.

Satellite and cable internet are very different creatures, with very different use cases.

A short thread…

theconversation.com/the-tonga-volc…

Fibre-optic internet is superior in nearly every respect to satellite. It’s vastly less costly: tens of dollars per megabit vs thousands of dollars. It’s faster getting from here to there. Voice conversations over satellite feature 2 second lag, making crosstalk a constant woe.

Satellite latency doesn’t play nicely with TCP, the main language spoken between computers to transfer data. TCP is robust because it checks that every bit arrives at its destination, and resends any lost ones.

Over satellite, it stalls, stumbles and sometimes just fails.

Obviously anything interactive, be it chat, gaming, remote access to machines, is painful and often unviable.

Fibre optic cables change the we use the internet…

When Tonga’s cable made landfall, cost of internet dropped by a large multiple compared to geostationary satellite.

In Vanuatu, bandwidth usage rose by orders of magnitude, and costs dropped through the floor.

It’s still expensive, because of the cost of the cable, though…

I pay US $300 / month for a 10 megabit connection. Not great, but it performs well, and works well enough that I can be having a meeting online while my daughter watches Bruno videos from Tiktok.

But that high cost masks a bigger risk….

Vanuatu’s cable was privately funded, but the World Bank was instrumental in funding Tonga’s cable, along with others present or proposed in the Pacific.

Ours cost US $30 million. That’s a massive chunk of our annual expenditure. Cables need to serve large populations to work.

And they can’t just land proximate to those large populations, you need to build out transmission networks into the communities.

For PNG, this has proven an immense challenge, hence the failure of the Coral Sea Cable to materially affect prices in the short term.

For Kiribati, the Marshalls, Tuvalu, Solomon Islands… all of us, really, except the one island states, this is a huge additional cost, that is borne by a tiny, often cash-poor society.

That kind of performance, though, is necessary for us to be included in modern society.

In effect, it’s really hard to go forward with cable, but we absolutely cannot go back to geostationary satellites—not if we want to meaningfully exist in the digital world.

But there’s hope…

Recent advances in internet technology promise better satellite service at more affordable prices.

Medium Earth Orbit satellites perform much better, and they’re vastly less costly to launch than geostationary sats.

They’re a viable backup to cable, competitively priced.

And Low Earth Orbit satellites, which circle the earth only a few dozen km above the surface, are even more performant. If @elonmusk’s Starlink works as advertised, it’ll outperform fibre-optic for important tasks.

But many are sceptical, as with all of Musk’s advances.

@elonmusk So yes, diversification is what we need in the Pacific islands. Cables break. Satellites cost. Starlink and others are unready and unproven.

But here’s the kicker. None of those would have kept Tonga online Saturday.

The shockwave appears to have broken the cable, twice…

@elonmusk But satellites are affected by atmospherics, so in a dense ash cloud, or at the height of a cyclone, they’re going to let us down.

Likewise, terrestrial networks get hit by power loss, winds and seismic events.

Communications are least available right when we need them most.

@elonmusk The plain fact is that Pacific islands don’t suffer from weakness in communications. They suffer from fragile communications.

Other countries can route around even widespread events like this, by re-routing traffic over jury-rigged networks to stables points of presence.

@elonmusk But for us, one cable (if any) is all we’ve got, and all we can afford.

Even satellite earth stations can be expensive points of failure if they’re damaged.

And local networks, serving tiny populations, create immense commercial burdens when repairs are needed.

@elonmusk Yes, we can maintain individual links with sat phones and some remote sensing devices.

Yes, diversity mitigates these issues.

But the cost to the economy militates against diversity. It’s hard enough to afford the trousers without having to pay for the belt and suspenders.

@elonmusk Economics, logistics and geography dictate that Pacific island nations have got to plan to be incommunicado during critical moments in emergencies.

We can mitigate the impacts, but how to absorb the costs.

Telecoms San Frontières and others help a lot….

@elonmusk But economic, development and disaster planning needs to internalise and integrate the outlandish cost of having even nominal internet services.

There is no simple solution.

The question is:

What cost are we willing to pay to keep the peoples of the Pacific connected?