Tonga’s 2022 eruption cut both subsea cables, halting ATMs, export paperwork, and foreign remittances that make up 44% of its GDP. Limited satellite bandwidth and later Starlink terminals provided only partial relief until a repair ship restored the cable weeks later—then another quake re‑severed the domestic link in 2024.
— For remittance‑dependent economies, resilient connectivity is an economic lifeline, implying policy needs redundant links and rapid satellite failover to avoid nationwide cash‑flow collapse.
BeauHD
2026.01.16
80% relevant
NetBlocks’ population figure and duration quantify a shutdown that will quickly disrupt economic lifelines—payments, commerce, banking—just as the Tonga case showed, so the Iran outage is a real‑world example of how connectivity loss translates into large economic and humanitarian impact.
msmash
2025.10.02
100% relevant
“Foreign remittances made up 44% of the country’s GDP,” and the outage froze banking and transfers until 120 Mbps of satellite bandwidth and donated Starlink terminals arrived.
← Back to All Ideas