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Papua New Guinea is by far the largest country considered part of the Pacific Islands. While most of its 7.6 million residents live on the main island of New Guinea, many are spread over around 600 smaller islands.
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Difficult terrain and low
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levels of urbanisation
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have led to fixed line penetration of only around 150,000 residences
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The majority of Internet subscribers in PNG use fixed line services from incumbent Telikom PNG or value added reseller Datec, both of whom pass their traffic to Australia via the APNG cable - a repurposed segment of the PacRim West cable. These subscribers and the cable landing station reside in Port Moresby. To the north terrain has made fibre optic connections impossible, and only microwave links are in place. Digicel PNG carries the bulk of mobile traffic and around 20% of all Internet traffic through a combination of submarine cable access at Kelanoa and O3b satellite.
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. Mobile coverage reaches around 67% of the population, and 3g services reach around 41%, but only 33% of the population has mobile phones. Around a million mobile subscribers have access to the Internet, with around 600,000 of them using smartphones.
Digicel is PNG's dominant carrier, with around 92% of all mobile subscribers. From the perspective of Internet traffic served though, In 2019 they had only around 60% market share. Other providers including Telikom PNG, Datec, Speedcast, bMobile, and a host of smaller ISPs serve the balance.
PNG is serviced by two fibre optic cables. Their first connection was the APNG2 cable, a repurposed section of PACRIM West that carries around 1.2 Gbps of voice and low-speed data traffic from Sydney to Port Moresby. Their second connection was a branch unit of PPC-1 to Madang, in the north of the country.
Several additional cable projects are including the Kumul domestic submarine cable and the Coral Sea Cable System which will connect Port Moresby and Honiara with Sydney.