
Mobile communications and Internet in Tonga
Compared to the United States, Tonga is massively lagging behind in the development of telecommunications. Under the country code +676, there were a total of 75,152 connections in 2021. Among them were 64,328 mobile phones, which corresponds to an average of 0.61 per person. In the US, this figure is 1.1 mobile phones per person.With about 5,367 webhosts, Tonga is below the world's average by population. At the end of 2020, 59 of these, or about 1 percent, were secured with SSL or comparable encryption.
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Mobile phone rates in Tonga
Every year, the International Telecommunication Union calculates for many countries what a mobile phone contract costs to use. A monthly budget averaging US$ 13.30 was calculated Tonga in 2021. This is about the same value as in the previous year.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 The transfer speed should be the minimum of a 3G connection, i.e. at least UMTS, which is already outdated in many parts of the world. 2 GBytes do not sound much.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 Tonga spends 3.1% 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 Tonga (as of 2021). The penetration rate of 4G, i.e., mobile communications with at least LTE speed, was recently 96 percent. In other words, 4,240.68 people in the country had to make do with a maximum Internet speed of the outdated UMTS standard (or even less).The following diagrams show the development of the various telephone and internet connections as a percentage of the country's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 Tonga from 1990 - 2021
Broadband internet in Tonga 2002 - 2021

Landlines 1990 - 2021
Mobile phones 1990 - 2021
► All international calling codes
Distribution in 2021 | Tonga Total | Tonga percent | USA Total | USA percent |
---|---|---|---|---|
Internet users | 75,893.94 | 71.59 % | 304.52 m | 91.75 % |
Broadband users | 6,812.00 | 6.43 % | 125.89 m | 37.93 % |
Landlines | 10,824.00 | 10.21 % | 97.82 m | 29.47 % |
Mobile cellulars | 64,328.00 | 60.68 % | 361.66 m | 108.97 % |