The Faroe Islands' Undersea-Cable Lifeline — High Internet Reach Alongside a Stalled Domestic Fibre Rollout

Two long-distance submarine cables — SHEFA-2, linking the Faroes to Shetland and onward to mainland Scotland (completed 2008), and FARICE-1, linking the islands to Iceland and Scotland (2004, now carrying over 3 Tbps of traffic alongside sister cable IRIS since 2023) — give the roughly 55,000 residents of this remote North Atlantic archipelago international bandwidth comparable to far larger economies. Operator and independent aggregator data confirm the payoff: DataReportal recorded 97.6% of Faroese residents as internet users at the start of 2024, and World Bank figures put fixed broadband subscriptions at 34.6 per 100 people in 2022.
Extending that backbone to every home proved harder. State-owned Føroya Tele, through subsidiary NET, has spent an estimated 270 million Danish kroner installing fibre-to-the-home connections, with per-household cost rising from an original estimate of under 20,000 DKK past 30,000 DKK. By mid-2026, reporting attributed to NET's managing director Páll H. Vesturbú indicated that more than a third of the roughly 10,500 connections Føroya Tele had described as 'laid to customers' were physically cabled but not actually activated — after a lawmaker publicly questioned the telecoms minister over stalled progress and alleged the parent company had failed to fund the rollout. NET responded by pausing all new fibre installation to redirect resources toward activating the dormant lines already in the ground, and some households are now being offered wireless broadband instead.
The Faroese case is a genuine mixed result: robust, redundant international connectivity has delivered near-universal internet use, but the harder 'last mile' of physically finishing a small, dispersed population's home fibre network has run into cost overruns and funding gaps that even a wealthy, well-connected territory has struggled to solve — a caution against assuming backbone investment alone guarantees full domestic reach.

Read the full analysis: https://www.dailynorthern.com/20959/faroese-fibre-rollout-halted-as-thousands-left-without-working-connections/