Greenland Connect — Submarine Fibre Bringing Broadband to the Arctic
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A subsea fibre-optic cable network connecting Greenland to Iceland and Canada cut Nuuk's internet latency by ~500ms overnight in 2009 …
Good practice
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The Tuvalu Vaka Cable: From 73 Mbps to a Connected Digital Nation
Tuvalu · Funafuti · See the Tuvalu profile
A US$29m World Bank grant to reform Tuvalu's telecom sector, followed by a five-nation submarine cable activated in October 2025, took one of the world's least-connected nations from as little as 73 Mbps to headroom beyond 10 Gbps.
73 Mbps
Government-building bandwidth (baseline)
340-640 Mbps
National bandwidth after 2020 satellite deal (2020)
>10 Gbps
Cable engineering headroom (2025)
3 Gbps
Interim Starlink Community Gateway capacity (2025)
29 USD million
World Bank IDA grant (2019)
11000
Population served
Details
- Promoter
- Government of Tuvalu / World Bank (IDA)
- Period
- 2019-present
- Keywords
- submarine cable, national broadband, satellite connectivity, digital government
Context
The Tuvalu Vaka Cable programme addresses connectivity for Tuvalu (roughly 11,000 people across nine dispersed atolls), beginning with a 2019 US$29m World Bank IDA grant that funded a new ICT policy, restructuring of Tuvalu Telecommunications Corporation toward a public-private partnership, and preparatory work on submarine cable options, culminating in the multi-government-backed Vaka Cable activated in October 2025.
Results
Documented bandwidth rose from as little as 73 Mbps at key government buildings, to roughly 340-640 Mbps after a 2020 commercial satellite capacity deal with Kacific, to engineering headroom beyond 10 Gbps following the cable's October 2025 activation, with an interim Starlink Community Gateway adding up to a further 3 Gbps earlier in 2025. Sources explicitly caveat that no independent evaluation of downstream socioeconomic outcomes (health, education, business activity) has yet been published.
Implementation
Implementation detail (cost, timeline, staffing, conditions for success) is not yet available for this practice.
Data sources
Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.
- C-NAPSE web research — accessed 2026-07-09
- Government of Tuvalu / World Bank (IDA) — accessed 2026-07-09
- World Bank: Affordable, Faster Connectivity for Tuvalu (2019) — accessed 2026-07-09
- Devpolicy Blog: The Tuvalu Vaka Cable - building connectivity and a Digital Nation (2025) — accessed 2026-07-09
- RNZ: World Bank promises better internet for Tuvalu — accessed 2026-07-09
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