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EDITOR IN CHIEF- ABDULLAH BIN SALIM AL SHUEILI

Learning to talk again: life sans internet in Tonga

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Mary Lyn Fonua -


Atwo-week cyber blackout caused financial headache and social heartache in remote Tonga, but it also forced residents of the Pacific island kingdom to rediscover the art of offline communication.


The sudden internet outage on January 20 brought an abrupt halt to many businesses and cut access to social media — the community’s lifeline to the outside world.


“We had to learn how to talk to each other without internet messaging,” Joshua Savieti, who works in the creative arts, said of the digital detox.


It took 13 days to find the fault — a severed undersea cable — and reconnect Tonga, which lies nearly 2,400 km northeast of New Zealand.


During the blackout, a small, locally operated satellite service helped maintain limited service, but the speed was a throwback to dial-up days.


To conserve capacity officials filtered out social media, cutting families off from relatives and friends overseas and dealing a blow to companies which operate through Facebook.


For many of Tonga’s 110,000 residents, it was a wake-up call to how much they have come to rely on the internet in just half a decade since the 827 km fibre-optic cable from Fiji was put into service.


Some queued for hours to access the satellite service, while others pottered about in their gardens or went out socialising.


“I actually felt that it was pretty good to be forced off the internet and talk to people again, go outside and see what everyone’s up to,” Savieti said.


But the outage did not come as a welcome break for everyone.


Lives were at stake as medicine stocks reached dangerously low levels, and Health Ministry chief Siale ‘Akau’ola lost contact with government outposts on Tonga’s outer islands.


For Tonga, which relies heavily on international links for daily supplies and vital tourism income, no internet meant serious problems with making and confirming transactions.


Banks could not process money transfers, hitting families reliant on income from relatives working overseas.


Sam Vea, Tonga agent for global freight giant DHL, said the first week of the outage created “major issues.’’ “We could not send our shipments because we have to upload documents before they are put onto the plane,” he said.


The cause of the break in the cable has not been determined but it is suspected it was cut by a ship dragging its anchor along the seabed.


— AFP


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