Telecommunications companies operating in the Pacific will need to share infrastructure, strike wholesale agreements and work more closely with governments if the region is to overcome the difficult economics of building modern digital networks in small markets.
That was the message from Amalgamated Telecom Holdings chief executive Ivan Fong at the Pacific Fiber Conference 2026, held at the Sheraton Fiji Golf Resort and Spa in Nadi in late July. Fong told delegates that telecommunications infrastructure remained expensive to build across the Pacific, while limited customer numbers often made investments difficult to justify on a standalone commercial basis.
The problem is familiar across island economies. Submarine cables, fibre networks, data infrastructure and mobile systems require substantial upfront capital, but the markets they serve can be measured in tens or hundreds of thousands of customers rather than millions.
Fong argued that the answer lies partly in finding ways to spread both cost and risk. He identified wholesale agreements, infrastructure sharing and direct partnerships with governments and regulators as possible ways of improving the investment equation and generating sufficient traffic across networks.
His comments point to an important shift in the way Pacific connectivity projects may have to be structured. The traditional model of each operator building and owning separate infrastructure becomes increasingly difficult to sustain when markets are small and capital costs are high.
There is also a delicate balance for governments and development partners. Fong said private investors need protection against downside risk, but public subsidies should not be structured in a way that crowds commercial capital out of the market. The objective, he argued, should be to ensure that communities are not denied modern services simply because a project cannot quite make the numbers work commercially.
For Australian telecommunications, engineering and infrastructure companies, that creates opportunities beyond straightforward network construction. Shared infrastructure demands expertise in network design, financing, regulation, cybersecurity, asset management and public-private partnership structures.
The discussion comes as demand for digital services across the Pacific continues to expand, driven by cloud applications, digital government, mobile financial services and artificial intelligence. Yet each new layer of digital activity ultimately depends on the physical networks underneath it.
The question for the Pacific is therefore no longer simply how much infrastructure to build. Increasingly, it is how to finance, share and operate that infrastructure sustainably across some of the world’s smallest and most geographically dispersed markets.
