The Kingdom of Tonga in the South Pacific was cut off from the Internet after a volcanic eruption. The state was connected to the world by a single underwater Internet cable.
Like many island nations, Tonga connects to the Internet with a single garden-hose-thick submarine cable that contains fiber optic strands. However, on January 18, international and domestic Internet communications were interrupted due to cable damage.
The government says "limited communications" are possible via satellite phones and high-frequency radio.
The internet cable connecting Tonga to the internet is 827km long, according to Reuters, and is secured via a relay in Fiji, its second-nearest neighbor. Repairing a cable can take up to two weeks, as the job requires the intervention of a submarine cable repair specialist.
The nearest such ship is Reliance, owned by the American firm SubCom. But it is currently moored 4,700 km away in Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea, and will take several days to reach Tonga.
According to Craige Sloots, director of marketing and sales for Southern Cross Cable Network, which operates several submarine cables in the region, this means it could take two weeks to restore Internet connectivity in Tonga. In addition, the work will depend on volcanic activity.
Earlier, NASA estimated the power of the eruption of the underwater volcano Tonga (Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Haapai), which occurred on January 15. It is about 10 megatons of TNT. This is hundreds of times more powerful than the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima at the end of World War II. This is the loudest eruption since Krakatoa in 1883. In Peru, two people died due to a tsunami caused by a volcano, and another 150 residents of the Mango and Atata islands were missing. The tsunami reached New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Russia, USA, Canada, Mexico, Chile, Ecuador.
Currently, 99% of international Internet traffic is carried by submarine cables. According to experts, the length of 436 cables is 1.3 million km. But while richer countries like the US are served by multiple cables, poorer countries like Tonga are forced to rely on just one.
The Kingdom has already experienced a similar internet outage in 2019. As a result, it signed a 15-year contract with satellite internet company Kacific to protect against future disruptions. But according to a ZDNet report, the terms of the provider's contract were disputed, resulting in the satellite link never being activated.
Technicians on a dedicated repair boat will now have to find the fault in the Tonga cable, then swim to the break and, depending on the depth of the water, extract the cable using diving robots or hooks. After that, the cable will be brought to the surface and repaired by engineers on board the ship.
bbabo.Net