Papua New Guinea's state-owned telecoms wholesaler PNG DataCo has attributed a month of service disruptions to three separate causes: abnormal power supply from the national grid, vandalism of a terrestrial fibre route, and a fault on the Vanimo branch of its Kumul Domestic Submarine Cable System.

The company detailed the incidents on Sunday, offering customers a timeline that spans from late August into October.

Power phase fault knocked out Gerehu, Kerema and Daru

Services tied to the Gerehu Earth Station, its adjacent data centre, and cable landing stations at Kerema and Daru went dark on September 19. Engineers traced the cause to abnormal power phase rotation — damage introduced during maintenance work carried out by utility PNG Power Ltd on its network.

Power to the Gerehu facilities returned on September 21. Services to Kerema and Daru followed two days later, on September 23.

The incident underlines a structural vulnerability for PNG DataCo: its transmission infrastructure depends on the reliability of PNG Power's grid, and a routine maintenance error cascaded into outages across multiple landing stations serving wholesale customers.

Vandals cut the Madang–Yonki corridor

On the same day, September 19, vandals damaged the terrestrial fibre optic cable along the Madang–Yonki corridor. The cut disrupted services to Lae, Yonki and the entire Highlands Region.

Crews repaired the cable and restored all affected services by September 21, a two-day turnaround for a route that carries traffic to one of the country's most populous regions.

Kumul subsea branch fault isolates Vanimo

A longer-running problem emerged on August 25, when PNG DataCo detected a fault on the branch of the Kumul Domestic Submarine Cable System connecting Vanimo. The failure affected point-to-point (P2P), international Ethernet private line (IEPL) and wholesale internet services across Sandaun Province.

Repair preparations are underway, and the wholesaler aims to restore subsea connectivity to Vanimo by October 23 — roughly two months after the fault was first detected. Subsea cable repairs typically require securing a repair vessel and permits, which extends timelines well beyond those of terrestrial fixes.

Australia–Singapore Cable break adds latency

A fourth factor is degrading performance even though it lies outside PNG's borders. A break on the Australia–Singapore Cable (ASC), which occurred earlier this month, is contributing to increased latency, degraded performance or intermittent access to some internet services and Asia-hosted content, PNG DataCo said.

The break sits on the ASC segment between Indonesia and Singapore. The cable does not connect directly to Papua New Guinea, but PNG traffic transiting Asian routes feels the impact.

Cable owner Vocus has rerouted traffic onto alternative network paths until repairs complete — a standard resilience measure, though one that trades performance for continuity.

For PNG's wholesale-dependent retail market, the cluster of incidents illustrates how a small number of physical assets — one terrestrial corridor, one subsea branch, a handful of landing stations and a single power feed — carry the country's international and domestic connectivity. PNG DataCo has set October 23 as its next hard deadline: restoring the Vanimo subsea link and closing out the most disruptive of the four faults.