St. Helena has no broadband and needs to be connected

St. Helena is a British territory in the South Atlantic Ocean.  Due to its weak economy and remote location, the island receives around £11.5 million from the UK and ~€ 3.1 million from the EU per year.

The economy is so bad that nearly one fifth of the population emigrated in the last ten years.

St. Helena is so remote that a Royal Mail Ship has to make a five-day journey from Cape Town, South Africa to bring mail and supplies.  There is no other way for the island’s residents to obtain their supplies.

Broadband is just about non-existent.  The island has a single 10 Mbps satellite base station which is shared with 4,000 people.  This gives extremely slow access speeds.

Telephone calls across the satellite link are extremely expensive.  To make matters worse, solar flares make their satellite link useless for periods of time.

St. Helena is looking for a solution to connect them with the modern works and with the world markets.  They believe they have found a solution and have set up a web site to explain their dilemma.

To demonstrate the severity of the problem they posted this picture on the page that was going to show the video they made.

This year, the South Atlantic Express (SAex) fiber optic cable will be placed on the Atlantic Ocean seabed floor to connect South Africa to Brazil.  This fiber optic cable will be the world’s fastest with a throughput of 12.8 Tbps (Terabits per second).

The cable will be 8970 km if it is installed with the current planned route, but that path passes north of the island.  St. Helena has proposed a different route that would add only 50 km to the length and would provide them with advanced Internet and voice services that are more reliable and hugely less expensive.

This minor route change could boost the economy of this UK territory and bring them into the digital age.

If you wish to help, follow them on the St. Helena Facebook page.  You can also find a list of companies and persons to contact to help and persuade them to provide an extra 50 km of fiber connecting St. Helena with the modern world.  The additional cost would be a lot less than the economic gains St. Helena will achieve with this crucial link to the world economy.

Help St. Helena to get the companies involved to  and bring