
Mobile communications and Internet in Nauru
Compared to the United States, Nauru is massively lagging behind in the development of telecommunications. Under the country code +674, there were a total of 10,000 connections in 2021. Among them were 10,000 mobile phones, which corresponds to an average of 0.80 per person. In the US, this figure is 1.1 mobile phones per person.With about 8,162 webhosts, Nauru is below the world's average by population. At the end of 2020, four of these, or about 0 percent, were secured with SSL or comparable encryption.
Back to overview: Nauru
Mobile phone rates in Nauru
Every year, the International Telecommunication Union calculates for many countries what a mobile phone contract costs to use. A monthly budget averaging US$ 18.90 was calculated Nauru in 2021. Compared to the previous year, this amount decreased by 40 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 The transfer speed should be the minimum of a 3G connection, i.e. at least UMTS, which is already outdated in many parts of the world. 2 GBytes do not sound much.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 Nauru spends 1.5% 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 Nauru (as of 2021). The penetration rate of 4G, i.e., mobile communications with at least LTE speed, was recently 30 percent. In other words, 8,757.70 people in the country had to make do with a maximum Internet speed of the outdated UMTS standard (or even less).The following diagrams show the development of the various telephone and internet connections as a percentage of the country's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 Nauru from 1990 - 2021
Broadband internet in Nauru 2010 - 2019

Landlines 1990 - 2019
Mobile phones 1990 - 2021
Distribution in 2021 | Nauru Total | Nauru percent | USA Total | USA percent |
---|---|---|---|---|
Internet users | 10,501.13 | 83.94 % | 304.52 m | 91.75 % |
Mobile cellulars | 10,000.00 | 79.93 % | 361.66 m | 108.97 % |