North Pacific Regional Connectivity Investment Project — Palau's Submarine Fibre-Optic Cable

Before 2017, Palau (population roughly 18,000-20,000) relied entirely on expensive, low-bandwidth satellite links for internet; only about 25% of the population had internet access despite 90% owning mobile phones.

In 2015 the Asian Development Bank approved two loans totalling $25 million for the North Pacific Regional Connectivity Investment Project, financing a low-latency submarine fibre-optic cable — built by NEC and operated by the newly formed Belau Submarine Cable Corporation — connecting Palau to the SEA-US submarine cable system via a branching unit.

The cable was commissioned in November 2017, delivering five 100-gigabit-per-second wavelengths, and is credited with enabling nationwide 4G mobile broadband with reported download speeds of up to 72 Mbps. The ADB's own framing describes a "more than ten-fold" capacity increase, a more conservative figure than a widely cited "1,000-fold" quote from a company CEO in independent press.

A second cable, delivered under the US-Australia-Japan Trilateral Partnership for Infrastructure Investment in the Indo-Pacific and targeted for "ready for service" in 2024-2025, was commissioned specifically to add redundancy — an explicit response to the risk of depending on a single cable. Because Palau's population is very small, the absolute number of people affected is modest even though the percentage-based improvements are dramatic.