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.

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Submarine Cable

Satellite

The Commission's Market and Competition Unit is responsible for the management of the Commissions efforts to create a soundly functioning telecommunications service provider market in the Solomon Islands through effective liberalisation and, where necessary, regulation of the market. The Unit's function covers three broad areas: 

1. Market Intelligence
2. Market Regulation
3. Collection of data

Rationale

The statistical information on the Solomon Islands telecommunications market and benchmark data from other countries is collected and analysed by the Market Intelligent & Competition Unit (MIC). The MIC Unit informs stakeholders of the development of competition in the Solomon Islands Telecommunication market by means of research through its quarterly and annual key data report.

Additional data from consultations and also in the form of end-user surveys provides an insight into the use of electronic communications and postal services by both businesses and consumers in Solomon Islands.

Additionally, information on the Solomon Islands telecommunications market is provided to external organisations for the purposes of benchmarking Solomon Islands against other countries. The main organisations to which TCSI provides data are outlined below: 

ITU

SPC

Central Bank of Solomon Islands

World Bank

AAPT

PITA

Solomon Islands Chamber of Commerce and Industry

Commonwealth of Nations

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Service Providers

Market Surveillance

Market Statistics

International Connectivity

Consumer Affairs

Dispute Resolution

Interconnection & Access Agreements

Investigations

The Commission is responsible for issuing licences, orders, determinations and directions with regards to the geographical coverage, service deployment, key performance and quality of service requirements for operators.

Geographical coverage is expressed as a percentage of the population of the Solomon Islands, based on the population estimates set out in Appendix D of the pdf Telecommunications Act (2009) (627 KB) .

See the Market Statistics page for more information on coverage statistics since 2009.

Maps of Operator towers are also available for download - maps are made available only in PDF or image format. A combined map of all Service Providers towers can be found here. Contact us if you would like to request maps in other formats.

See below for an interactive map of Operator Towers as of 31 July, 2020. Select an operator from the provided options to display a corresponding map below. Visitors using smartphones may need to zoom out or scroll the map to view all locations.