Elon Musk’s satellite Internet venture is helping to restore connectivity to the Pacific island nation of Tonga, said an official in Fiji, where the work is under way.
Tonga’s sole fiber-optic link to the Internet and the rest of the world was severed by a volcanic eruption on Jan. 15 and only limited connectivity has been possible since.
“A SpaceX team is now in Fiji establishing a Starlink gateway station to reconnect Tonga to the world,” Fiji Attorney General Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum said on Twitter.
Photo: AP
Starlink is a division of Tesla chief executive Musk’s SpaceX aerospace company and last month Musk himself had taken to Twitter to mention that Starlink might be able to help.
The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano eruption triggered a tsunami that destroyed villages and resorts and blanketed the capital of the nation of about 105,000 people in ash, as well as cutting the fiber-optic communications cable.
The timing of SpaceX’s work is not clear, although Fijian Broadcasting Corp, citing Sayed-Khaiyum, said engineers would operate a ground station in Fiji for six months.
SpaceX did not immediately respond to an e-mailed request for comment. Tonga’s prime minister’s office and state telecom Tonga Communications Corp could not immediately be reached by telephone or e-mail.
Refinitiv shipping data show that cable repair ship Reliance has been off the coast of Tonga’s main island for nearly a week as it seeks to fix the damaged subsea cable.
Any improvement in communications is likely to be a relief for Tongans who have struggled to stay in touch with relatives abroad and to assist recovery efforts that have also been hampered by a COVID-19 lockdown.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema