
Mobile communications and Internet in Kiribati
Compared to the United States, Kiribati is massively lagging behind in the development of telecommunications. Under the country code +686, there were a total of 52,647 connections in 2021. Among them were 52,632 mobile phones, which corresponds to an average of 0.41 per person. In the US, this figure is 1.1 mobile phones per person.With about 327 webhosts, Kiribati is below the world's average by population. At the end of 2020, five of these, or about 2 percent, were secured with SSL or comparable encryption.
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Mobile phone rates in Kiribati
Every year, the International Telecommunication Union calculates for many countries what a mobile phone contract costs to use. A monthly budget averaging US$ 33.00 was calculated Kiribati in 2021. Compared to the previous year, this amount decreased by 10 cents.The ITU refers to the costs for monthly use and includes 140 telephony minutes, 70 text messages and a data transfer of 2 GBytes. The transfer speed should be the minimum of a 3G connection, i.e. at least UMTS, which is already outdated in many parts of the world. 2 GBytes do not sound much. However, this is already quite a high consumption in a worldwide comparison. If one does not take a fixed amount in US dollars, but converts it to the economic output per inhabitant, a user in Kiribati spends 14.47% of his gross national income on mobile telephony. Worldwide, this rate is around 6.6 percent.
In the USA, the monthly cost was around $38.10.
Lack of network coverage with 5G
A modern 5G network does not yet exist in Kiribati (as of 2021). The penetration rate of 4G, i.e., mobile communications with at least LTE speed, was recently 54 percent. In other words, 59,282.04 people in the country had to make do with a maximum Internet speed of the outdated UMTS standard (or even less).The following diagrams show the development of the various telephone and internet connections as a percentage of the country's population. Values above 100 percent mean that, on average, every inhabitant has more than one connection.
Access to the internet in Kiribati from 1990 - 2021
Broadband internet in Kiribati 2005 - 2021

Landlines 1990 - 2021
Mobile phones 1990 - 2021
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Distribution in 2021 | Kiribati Total | Kiribati percent | USA Total | USA percent |
---|---|---|---|---|
Internet users | 69,111.31 | 53.63 % | 304.52 m | 91.75 % |
Broadband users | 300.00 | 0.23 % | 125.89 m | 37.93 % |
Landlines | 15.00 | 0.01 % | 97.82 m | 29.47 % |
Mobile cellulars | 52,632.00 | 40.84 % | 361.66 m | 108.97 % |