Fibre now reaches every province and a national digital ID is live. The share of Papua New Guineans online has not moved since 2020.
Wholesale internet in Papua New Guinea cost K209 per megabit per month in 2025, down from K1,250 in 2018, according to figures Business Advantage PNG put to PNG DataCo chief executive Paul Komboi in an interview. Over most of that stretch, the share of Papua New Guineans using the internet barely changed.
The World Bank’s development indicators put internet use at 24.4% of the population in 2020 and 24.1% in 2023. DataReportal’s Digital 2026 report, built on Kepios analysis, put it at 24.1% at the end of 2025, or 2.60 million people. Three in four Papua New Guineans still do not use the internet.
DICT Secretary Steven Matainaho has said telecommunications connectivity reaches 80% of the population, Business Advantage PNG reported. NICTA’s latest estimates put mobile penetration at only 30% to 40%, according to the same publication’s 2025 annual edition.
“The penetration and the actual usage of mobile is still very minimal,” Tony Morisause, PNG DataCo’s general manager for engineering, told the 2024 Business Advantage PNG Investment Conference.
Cheaper bandwidth, same users
PNG DataCo, created in 2014 as a subsidiary of Kumul Consolidated Holdings, owns the National Transmission Network, which runs more than 12,000 km of domestic and international fibre, according to the state-owned wholesaler’s profile published alongside the February interview. Its centrepiece is the 4,700 km Coral Sea Cable linking PNG with Australia and Solomon Islands, owned equally by DataCo, the Commonwealth of Australia and the Solomon Islands Submarine Cable Company.
Komboi said Digicel, Vodafone and Telikom consume about 70% of the cable’s bandwidth, with ISPs and corporate buyers taking the rest. He credited the cable with “a rapid increase in national internet uptake” and said higher internet penetration is estimated to have contributed close to 1% to GDP growth, without naming the source of that estimate.
World Bank data shows internet use climbed from 6.5% of the population in 2014 to 20.0% in 2019 and 24.4% in 2020, after the Coral Sea Cable was completed in December 2019. It has not climbed since. DataReportal counted 45,000 new users between October 2024 and October 2025, growth of 1.8%, while the penetration rate held flat.
Komboi told Business Advantage PNG in 2021 that national data volumes had risen more than tenfold since 2014, while DataCo’s wholesale price fell from about K3,000 per Mbps to K300.
DataCo’s terrestrial fibre runs to all 22 provinces. By the company’s own figures, it reaches 48 of the country’s 96 districts.
In the same 2021 interview, Komboi said retailers “need to pass some of that benefit to their customers.” A year after the Coral Sea Cable went live, ABC Pacific reported that users still described mobile data as very expensive, and Australian National University researcher Amanda Watson said there had been no significant change in the price or speed of internet service.
Satellites enter the market
NICTA issued Starlink an operator licence on 29 April, after the National Court resolved a case between the Ombudsman Commission and the regulator, Business Advantage PNG reported. Judicial review proceedings had blocked the licence since February 2024, according to the publication’s earlier reporting. Between January and February, NICTA granted test permits to four companies to supply Eutelsat’s OneWeb service in PNG, according to the same publication.
Komboi said DataCo is partnering with low earth orbit providers to reach the 70% to 80% of the population beyond fibre. Over the next one to two years, he said, DataCo will also build redundancy into its submarine cable systems and terrestrial loop networks in the Highlands.
Towers and power
Digicel PNG has built 115 towers and upgraded 96 to 4G since Telstra acquired it in 2022, while Vodafone PNG has built 800 towers since entering the market that year, Business Advantage PNG reported in its 2025 annual edition.
DataCo set a target of 500 carrier-neutral mobile towers by 2026, part of a K592 million, three-year digital infrastructure budget that also covers phase two of the Kumul Submarine Cable Network, according to the same report. Exepreneur could not confirm how many of those towers are now operating.
“We’re filling in the gaps where the current mobile carriers can’t go because of economic reasons,” Morisause said.
Digicel PNG chief executive Tarik Boudiaf told the publication that new sites had driven year-on-year growth. He also said “the telco industry is not moving at the level expected.” Power supply and data coverage were the main dependencies, he said.
Content still comes from offshore
Internet Society Pulse data shows only 2% of the 1,000 most-visited websites in PNG can be reached from a local server or cache, against the organisation’s target of 50%.
DataCo runs data centres in Port Moresby and Madang and plans another in Kumul Petroleum’s special economic zone at Caution Bay, Komboi told Business Advantage PNG. It has also partnered with Oracle to offer Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to government and business under the DataCo name, including a learning management system for universities built with Samsung devices. DataCo is about to sign with five sister state-owned enterprises under Kumul Consolidated Holdings to start Oracle-backed digitalisation projects, Komboi said.
DataCo started using artificial intelligence internally in early 2025 and is drafting usage policies for its 140 staff, Komboi said. “We already know the advantage of AI,” he said.
Identity is the new bottleneck
The Department of Information and Communications Technology launched SevisPass and the SevisWallet app in November 2025 on biometric infrastructure supplied by TECH5, ID Tech reported.
In July, Matainaho said PNG’s digital economy lacked a trusted identity framework, with banks, telcos and other sectors running fragmented systems, according to Biometric Update.
Glen Bireo, an acting manager at DICT, told a PNG Customs workshop in August that SevisPass brings documents such as the National ID, passport and driver’s licence online as verifiable credentials, according to DICT. They are stored in the SevisWallet app behind biometric security. Any error in those older records carries into SevisPass.
DICT’s SevisPNG site describes a four-tier identity model in which citizens unlock more services as their verification level rises. Credentials sit in the citizen’s wallet with selective disclosure, and the department says no central database holds all of a person’s information.
Under a late-2025 agreement with MiBank, SevisPass holders can open a bank account from a phone in under ten minutes, according to an official social media post cited by Biometric Update. ID Tech reported that DICT later signed with the country’s two largest superannuation funds. Biometric Update reported in May that the digital ID is already mandatory for businesses bidding on state tenders.
Speaking at a US Embassy event in Port Moresby, Matainaho said SIM card registration “will be tied to a digital ID” to cut scam activity, according to DICT’s own account. Biometric Update reported that telcos would stop storing raw biometrics and verify customers through SevisPass tokens instead.
DICT introduced a Digital Identity and Verifiable Credentials Bill in May, following endorsement of the National Digital ID Policy in 2025, Biometric Update reported.
DICT is also working with NICTA and the Department of Justice to update the Cybercrime Code Act, and generative AI misuse, identity theft and voice cloning are set to come under regulation, Biometric Update reported in July.
Exepreneur could not locate any DICT figure for total SevisPass enrolments or active users. ID Tech reported that DICT hired 500 additional staff in late 2025 to clear an enrolment backlog, which confirms demand but not scale.
At the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference in Romania in 2022, then-ICT Minister Timothy Masiu named digital infrastructure investment, digital skills and cyber security as unresolved challenges, and said digital transformation “is not all about technology,” according to the ITU transcript. The harder part, he said, was changing the mindset of government, business and citizens. Under the Digital Government Act 2022, he told the same conference, PNG was enforcing a Cloud First Policy and data governance standards across government.
Submitting the Digital ID Policy to the Ministerial Economic Committee in July 2025, he called it “a foundational pillar” for the government’s digital programme, according to DICT. Its success, he said, hinged on NICTA acting as a proactive enabler. Masiu left the portfolio in July, when Robert Naguri took over in a cabinet reshuffle, NBC reported.
The SIM deadline
The SIM rule awaits endorsement. Once it is endorsed, every adult subscriber in PNG will have 12 months to link a number to SevisPass, according to Matainaho. Whether enrolment clears that bar will decide whether PNG’s digital ID becomes infrastructure or another registry.
