We Pacific Islanders know what connection means. Our ancestors crossed the world’s greatest ocean not because distance was small, but because courage, skill and shared purpose made distance navigable. That is how I see undersea cables. They are our new vaka, our new canoe routes. They do not replace the ocean. They help us use it differently, so that remoteness becomes reach and isolation becomes participation.

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Across our region, the map is changing quickly. East Micronesia has now delivered first cable links to Tarawa, Nauru and Kosrae. Tuvalu switched on its first international cable in 2025. Tonga has completed a second international route. Solomon Islands has funded another line so one break does not mean one nation offline. Vanuatu is building a second cable that will also support hazard sensing. Fiji is becoming an even stronger regional hub through Southern Cross NEXT and new Google-backed Pacific routes. This is not a minor upgrade. It is one of the biggest physical reorganizations of Pacific opportunity in a generation.

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When a cable lands, the first change is purely technical. Internet speed rises. Reliability improves. Latency drops. Video calls become credible. Digital payments work better. Cloud systems become usable. But the deeper change is economic. A small island business can sell more easily, coordinate with suppliers, market to visitors, process payments faster, and outsource less admin. A student can learn without waiting for a page to load forever. A clinic can share records and consult remotely. A public servant can put a service online instead of forcing every citizen to travel. DFAT, citing World Bank research, estimated that better Pacific connectivity could add more than US$5 billion in GDP and nearly 300,000 jobs by 2040. That should focus our minds.

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We already have proof points. Samoa’s cable expanded international bandwidth from 250 Mbps to 14,000 Mbps over 2015–2022 and drove monthly data downloads from 650 TB to 16,000 TB. Palau’s first cable produced dramatic and immediate reductions in cost and improved service standards. ADB reported that cables to Palau, Samoa and Tonga reduced internet costs by almost two thirds. These are not symbolic gains. They are measurable shifts in the cost and usefulness of being online.

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Yet we should be honest with ourselves. A cable can be transformative and still fall short. Samoa’s own evidence shows this. Despite a successful cable, only 30% of cell towers were on fibre in 2024, fixed household broadband subscriptions stood at 6.1%, and 47 districts remained underserved or unserved. That tells us something important: prosperity is not delivered at the beach manhole at the cable landing site. It is delivered when the benefits travel inland, village by village, clinic by clinic, school by school, household by household. If we stop at the landing station, we have built a promise, not an outcome.

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This is why I reject the false choice between infrastructure and inclusion. The Pacific needs both. We need wet cable and dry policy. We need international bandwidth, further telecom deregulation, and affordable retail tariffs. We need data centres, IXPs and cyber resilience, but we also need rural last-mile access, public Wi-Fi, and targeted support for women, youth and outer-island communities. Samoa’s current programme points in the right direction because it ties fibre rollout to district centres, telemedicine, schools, cyber resilience and government service delivery. That is how connectivity becomes development rather than just engineering.

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Tonga teaches the other essential lesson. A single cable can make a country more connected. It can also make a country more vulnerable if it becomes the only pathway. The 2022 eruption cut Tonga’s single undersea telecom cable and the country spent 38 days in digital isolation. The domestic extension took almost 18 months to repair. In the Pacific, disaster resilience is not a side issue. It is the main issue. Every serious national strategy should now assume that at some point a cable will break, a landing station will flood, power will fail, or a cyber incident will hit. Our systems must keep working anyway.

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There is also the question of sovereignty. Who owns the capacity? Who controls the landing? Who receives the revenue? Who sets the wholesale rules? Who holds the repair contract? Coral Sea offers a useful principle: PNG and Solomon Islands majority-own the cable capacity and receive the revenues. That is the direction I believe the region should favour. We can welcome external finance, technology and partners. But Pacific infrastructure should not become another story in which our geography is strategic for others while value capture happens somewhere else.

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Finally, we should think like ocean stewards. We depend on reefs, fisheries and healthy seas, so cable development must respect marine ecosystems and local communities. But the Pacific should also seize the positive environmental side of this technology. Vanuatu’s Tamtam project and the wider SMART-cable agenda show that submarine systems can help with tsunami warning and climate monitoring. In our region, the best projects will be those that connect people, protect lives, and strengthen our ability to read the ocean that has always defined us.

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My conclusion is simple. Undersea cables can help make Pacific prosperity real, but only if we refuse the lazy version of connectivity. We do not need cables that merely pass through the Pacific. We need cables that work for the Pacific. That means resilience before fragility, open access before bottlenecks, local value before dependency, and social purpose before bare headline speed. If we build that way, then these lines on the seabed will do more than carry data. They will carry our region forward.