The restoration of Internet connectivity in Tonga has been delayed until the middle of August after the cable repair ship broke down.
First reported in Radio New Zealand, the ship sent to repair the nation’s only domestic subsea cable has been stuck in Fiji with a damaged drive shaft.
The Tonga Domestic Cable Extension (TDCE), which connects the main island of Tongatapu with the northern islands of Vava’u and Ha’apai, has been down since June 29.
Stan Ahio, acting communications director for the government of Tonga, said the drive shaft was damaged after a fishing net became wrapped around one of the ship’s propellers.
It has already been stuck in Suva, Fiji, for more than a week, and is not expected to reach Tonga for another week.
Until the cable is restored in mid-August, the government has granted a provisional temporary permit to Starlink to operate for six months.
However, Ahio said Starlink is not yet available to new customers and very few people, other than businesses, can afford it.
He said: “Starlink’s website sales have not kicked off yet. It is still working on activating the Tongan currency so people here can buy the service.”
The outage was likely caused by an earthquake. It is the third major subsea cable outage that the TDCE has suffered since 2019.
In 2019, it was alleged that a ship’s anchor caused $1.2 million of damage to both the international and domestic cables near Nuku’afolka, leading to an Internet blackout from January 20 to February 6.
A worse outage took place in January 2022 when a large underwater volcano erupted, causing a cable break that would take 18 months to repair and was only fixed in July 2023.
