Solomon Islands has for the last two decades, relied exclusively on satellite for its international gateway. So although domestic costs are effectively moderated by competition, the country still does not enjoy the benefits which some other Pacific nations have in terms of faster internet access speed and lower charges for international interconnectivity due to those nations having connections through high capacity undersea cables.
However, in the coming years, this reliance on satellite for international connectivity is expected to have a shift for the better with the arrival of two planned undersea cable projects and a number of high throughput satellite constellations. The new capacity of the Coral Sea Cable alone is expected to be 2000 times larger than the country’s current usage.
In spite of this expected shift in reliance, established mobile network operators will still require satellite and mobile connectivity for telecommunications distribution around provincial locations. Additionally the new international Low Earth Orbit and Near Earth Orbit constellations will be accessible from throughout the Solomon Islands, meaning that local internet connectivity can be achieved without a ubiquitous nation-wide network. Moreover, it is expected that the new satellite services will have very low latency, making them comparable with cable services for sensitive applications such as financial transactions.