As a nation in free association with the United States, Palau has been able to draw on rural utilities funding from the USA to rebuild and modernise its telecommunications infrastructure. Funds have been used by Palau National Communications Corporation (PNCC) to build fourteen points of presence linked by fibre optic cables and microwave links. Today nearly every household in the nation has access to fixed line
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and mobile telephony, and more than half have Internet connectivity.
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A competitive provider,
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Palau Telecoms offers fixed wireless connectivity and WiFi hotspots
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, carrying around 20% of
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the island nation's traffic.
As the SEA-US cable passes nearby Palau on its route from Guam to Indonesia and the Philippines, Palau was able to build a spur connection with a grant from the International Development Association. Service went live in December 2017 and has increased the available bandwidth on the island by around seven times in just two years.
Palau's resiliency provider is O3b Networks, with traffic terminating in Australia
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. In 2019 Palau asked the Asian Development Bank for a loan to help connect to a second submarine cable, to provide fibre redundancy. Their rationale cites recent outages in Tonga, the Marshall Islands, and in nearby CNMI. They expect payments on the new cable to be equal to their payments for redundancy via satellite today.