Just when you’ve started to think that the Internet is one of the most resilient of human inventions, something happens to remind you that it’s actually a lot more fragile than you might think. That’s what happened this week in Tonga after a catastrophic volcanic eruption resulted in a complete loss of Internet connection for the entire island nation.
Most larger, wealthier countries have multiple undersea fiber-optic cables supporting their Internet connections, so if one goes down, for the most part, no one will notice. Tonga, however, relied on only one undersea cable, which was damaged in the Jan. 14 volcanic eruption. The Tonga government said that, as a result, “communications both international and domestic were severed.” They have been relying on satellite phones and high-frequency radio to maintain communications around the island.
Experts estimate that, at best, it will take two weeks to restore the country’s Internet. The closest undersea repair vessel, the Reliance, is 2,920 miles in Papua New Guinea. After the days that it will take for the ship to arrive, the crew will then need to identify the location of the damage, sail to that point, raise the cable to the surface and repair it onboard. Additionally, the “ability to repair would also be dependent, as you would expect, on any volcanic activity,” said Craige Sloots, a marketing and sales director at Southern Cross Cable Network, which operates in the area.
