Solomon Islands

Submarine cable connections

Solomon Islands reaches the global submarine cable network through the Coral Sea Cable System (CS²), which became ready for service in 2020 and spans approximately 4,700 kilometres across the southwest Pacific. The system lands at Honiara, the national capital on Guadalcanal, and extends to Auki on Malaita, Noro in Western Province, and Taro Island in Choiseul Province — a distribution that reflects the practical challenge of serving a country scattered across nearly 1,000 islands.

A second entry, listed separately in the cable register as CS2, is documented as active but lacks confirmed ready-for-service and length data; the relationship between this record and the primary CS² system is subject to ongoing verification.

Capacity and resilience

For most of its history, Solomon Islands depended on satellite links for international connectivity, leaving bandwidth constrained and latency high. The arrival of a fibre optic cable connection represented a material shift in what the country's network could support.

That said, the documented cable picture points to a single-system dependency. Where a country's international connectivity rests on one cable infrastructure, a fault — whether from a ship's anchor, seismic activity, or equipment failure — can degrade or sever the nation's external links entirely. Diversity in submarine cable routes, meaning physically separate systems following different seabed paths, is the standard mitigation. Based on the cables documented here, Solomon Islands does not yet have that redundancy at the international level, making the reliability of the CS² system itself a matter of national significance.

The multiple landing points within the country do, however, distribute domestic access more broadly than a single coastal terminus would allow. Connecting Auki, Noro, and Taro Island alongside Honiara means that fibre-based capacity is not exclusively concentrated in the capital — a meaningful consideration in a country where interisland transport has always shaped who gets access to services and who does not.

Geography and infrastructure

The Solomon Islands archipelago stretches across a considerable expanse of the Coral Sea and the western Pacific, with major island groups separated by open water. This geography drives up the cost and complexity of both the submarine cable infrastructure needed to reach the country and the domestic networks required to distribute connectivity once it arrives onshore. The landing point spread across four distinct locations reflects an attempt to work with that geography rather than treat Honiara as the sole gateway — though the limits of what a single cable system can guarantee remain a structural reality for the country's connectivity.