PJ Heller / ZUMA PRESS / Corbis

The Talamahu Market in the capital city of Nukualofa on the island of Tongatapu, Dec. 2, 2010.

The opening line on the Kingdom of Tongas tourism website reads, Welcome to life in the slow lane. It could be the national motto. The Polynesian nation of 176 far-flung islands but just 105,000 people has a long tradition of sitting on the sidelines of world affairs. Alone among island nations of the Pacific, Tonga was never colonized by a foreign power, mostly because foreign powers saw no compelling reason to extend their empires some 3,000 km east of Australia. An unbroken succession of local chiefs and kings has ruled over the islands for more than a thousand years. But there are downsides to Tongas state of restful isolation.

The Internet is very sporadic here, and the speed is quite slow, says Minoru Nishi Jr., a local importer-exporter. Connection speeds on the island lag far behind world standards, a reality that sets in every time Nishi returns from a visit to China or Japan. You get on the plane, he says, and go, oh no. A single high-resolution picture can take six to seven hours to send as an attachment, assuming it sends at all. Often what happens is it just cuts off, Nishi says, forcing him to restart the process all over again. We have to wait until the middle of the night, when there are no people on the Internet.

Hes not alone in his frustration. A local telecom executive said he has a habit of making coffee after he hits a button to download a document. The Secretary for Information and Communications says friends stop him in the street to complain about dropped calls over Skype. In fact, across all the island nations of the Pacific, a combined population of around 10 million people is chafing against narrow bandwidths that most of the world left behind in the screechy-modem days of the early 90s.

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The problem boils down to the Pacific Islands unique geography. Theres no other place in the world as remote and as small and as fragmented, says Franz Drees-Gross, the World Banks country director for the region. Take Kiribati, a nation of 100,000 people. Theyre on islands spread over a surface area equivalent to India, but if you were to collapse the islands into a single landmass, it would be thesize of New Delhi.

Telecom companies blanch at the cost of connecting these scattered islands to the rest of the world. Inthe age of the mobile device, its easy to forget the fact that the Internet at least the high-speed variety that many of us take for granted is a physical thing. It is zapped through undersea cables that span the worlds oceans, connecting continent to continent and landmass to landmass.

The first fiber-optic cables were laid down alongside telegraph cables from the mid-1800s. These bundles of glass wires as thin as a strand of hair are coated in a layer of resin or bands of steel to protect them from abrasions on the seafloor. The cables must wend their way around volcanic chasms and pick through delicate growths of coral reef before surfacing at a landing station, where Internet-service providers distribute bandwidth to customers.

Telecoms companies have gradually extended these cables to every populated area of the globe, with one notable exception: the fragmented populations of the Pacific Islands. There, the cost of building a cable dwarfs the revenue that could be collected from such a tiny base of subscribers. The investment may take decades to pay off, if ever. So the telecoms industry has understandably bypassed the region, leaving islanders to grapple with costly satellite connections that can rack up bills as high as $500 a month.

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Pacific Islands Struggle With Poor Internet Speeds