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

The roughly 55,000 residents of the Faroe Islands, a remote North Atlantic archipelago, are connected internationally by two submarine cables: SHEFA-2 to Shetland/mainland Scotland (completed 2008) and FARICE-1 to Iceland and Scotland (2004), now carrying over 3 Tbps of traffic alongside sister cable IRIS since 2023.

State-owned Føroya Tele, through subsidiary NET, set out to extend that international backbone into fibre-to-the-home connections for essentially the whole population.

Føroya Tele/NET spent an estimated 270 million Danish kroner installing fibre-to-the-home connections, with the cost per household rising from an original estimate of under 20,000 DKK to over 30,000 DKK.

International connectivity delivered near-universal internet use: DataReportal recorded 97.6% of Faroese residents as internet users at the start of 2024, and World Bank data put fixed broadband subscriptions at 34.6 per 100 people in 2022. But by mid-2026, over a third of the roughly 10,500 connections Føroya Tele described as 'laid to customers' were physically cabled yet not activated. Facing funding shortfalls and political scrutiny, NET paused new fibre installation to focus on activating existing lines, offering wireless broadband to some households instead.

The case is a genuine mixed result: robust, redundant international connectivity produced near-universal internet use, but finishing the 'last mile' of a small, dispersed population's home fibre network ran into cost overruns and funding gaps even in a wealthy, well-connected territory — a caution against assuming backbone investment alone guarantees full domestic reach.