We did not post much from St Helena, mainly because we were only online once in a while and for short times. The cost of WiFi on the island is high: 3.3 GBP per half hour and the Internet speed is very slow and connections sketchy to say the least. It was quite common to have to reload a website a number of times before it would even load and for transactions to fail because the website would time out.

We were warned about all of this but were still quite surprised how bad it actually is. We ended up only doing calls to the home front once in a while and otherwise write and record messages offline so that they would all be sent at the same time (saving valuable online time) when we went online again.

There are plans for fibre on the island which apparently have been in the making for at least a year without a clear finish date. There is a fibre end point on the island (which I believe branches of the cable that runs between Europe and Africa) and a few households have been hooked up to that. The roll out of island wide fibre still seems quite far away. Once this is available speed and reliability should go up dramatically and cost down.

Another option which some islanders have been exploring is satellite internet such as offered by Starlink. According to some Saints we talked with about this, it is supposedly illegal to get this on St Helena since the current Internet service provide has a legal monopoly. I’m not sure how much of that is true but those who do have Starlink on the island are keeping it quiet for this reason.

So some day in the future there will probably be fast and cheap internet on St Helena, but as we learned during our three month stay on the island, things move at a much slower pace there than in most places. Which actually is part of its charm. And not being tempted to constantly check your social media is a nice side effect of this. Just a bit frustrating when you need to do something online such as payments or important admin.