By Giff Johnson, Marianas Variety
MAJURO — After over three weeks in Internet purgatory, the Marshall Islands is back online following completion of repairs to the one submarine fiber optic cable linking the country to the outside world.
Since the cable was turned off Dec. 28 to allow repairs of a “power anomaly” to proceed, the country had been using satellite communications that reduced bandwidth available to this nation of 55,000 by 97 percent.
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The cable repair centered on the submarine cable at a location about 10 miles west of Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, which hosts the Reagan Missile Test Site facility. The cable links Majuro, Ebeye, the Army base at Kwajalein and Pohnpei in the Federated States of Micronesia to Guam.
National Telecommunications Authority General Manager Tommy Kijiner Jr. said that it initially took the repair crew longer to identify the exact location of the problem on the cable, which contributed to what was originally announced as a nine-day repair job lasting 23 days.
