Over the past few weeks, OpenFalklands has published a series of posts examining the financial cost of delay, the negotiating culture behind it, the historical pattern stretching back to 2005, and the case for a Select Committee. With the Falkland Islands Government (FIG) ExCo paper on the future of telecommunications now imminent (assuming this to be on the agenda of the 25th August 2026 ExCo meeting), this proposes four specific tests against which it should be judged, and against which Members of the Legislative Assembly should measure whatever is placed in front of them.
These are not abstract principles. They are drawn directly from published evidence, much of it from FIG’s own reports. MLAs do not need to take anyone’s word for any of this. The record is there.
Test 1: Who Pays for the Major Upgrade Stanley and Camp Need?
Stanley’s broadband network still runs on ageing ADSL2 copper infrastructure, a stopgap solution from decades ago that is now genuinely end of life. A credible fibre upgrade has been costed on this site at somewhere between £1.3 million and £1.8 million. Camp’s network tells a similar story: a WiMAX system that became a dead-end technology years ago, an LTE successor that still leaves long stretches of Camp roads with poor or no coverage, and a broadband service that many residents have already abandoned in favour of Starlink because the Sure South Atlantic (Sure) alternatives simply do not perform as well.
So why hasn’t Sure already paid for these upgrades during the many years of its exclusive licence? The answer is instructive. Some of the most significant capacity improvements of the past decade, including the 2019 satellite capacity increase and subsequent expansion, have depended heavily on FIG subsidies. Over £8 million of public money has been spent, at a time when Sure South Atlantic’s operations returned an estimated 29% net margin and paid dividends of £8.5 million and £9 million to its parent company in successive years. The figures make it difficult to argue that lack of profitability alone prevented greater reinvestment.
Sure also has an understandable reason not to commit serious capital to Stanley or Camp infrastructure while its future in the Islands remains unresolved. That is not a criticism of Sure; it is simply commercial logic, as this site has argued before, and only ExCo can break it by removing the uncertainty. But resolving that uncertainty does not answer the fundamental question of who will actually pay for the investment required. The August paper must therefore answer plainly, not for Sure but for whichever operator ultimately runs the network, who will fund the Stanley fibre upgrade and the Camp network renewal, on what timetable, and under what accountability if the upgrades do not materialise.
Test 2: A Decade of Dissatisfaction. Sure Has to Prove It Can Change, Not Just Say So
The evidence of dissatisfaction is not anecdotal. FIDC’s 2025 Business Climate Survey found that telecommunications bandwidth was identified by 44% of respondents as a barrier to growth, the single highest-ranked constraint in the survey, ahead of fuel costs, electricity prices and labour shortages. This is not a new finding. Telecommunications has featured among the top five barriers to business growth since at least 2018, and was ranked first again in 2025 after briefly falling to third in 2023. Twelve separate business sectors identified it as a constraint.
This pattern is not new to this decade either. The 2005 Doyle report and the 2015 Cartesian report identified strikingly similar problems: high prices, poor service quality, inadequate capacity, and weak regulatory oversight. Twenty years and two independent reviews have identified the same fundamental issues, and the Public Accounts Committee’s 2025 finding that it was difficult to demonstrate value for money from over £8 million in public expenditure sits squarely in that same twenty-year pattern.
Sure’s own Group CEO visited the Falklands in April 2026 and struck a markedly more constructive tone than his predecessor’s confrontational stance during the Starlink dispute, acknowledging the need for review mechanisms and competitive checks. That shift deserves genuine credit. But goodwill costs a company very little when it is not backed by capital. The two recent increases in mobile speeds may well have been made possible, at least in part, by reallocating satellite capacity freed up as fixed broadband customers migrated to Starlink. If so, they would have required considerably less new investment than a fundamental island-wide network upgrade. A change in tone is not the same as a change in behaviour.
Test 3: Go Back to the Market Before Interest Cools
Cambridge Management Consulting’s Preliminary Market Engagement process, which tested genuine commercial interest from operators worldwide, was completed by the end of 2025. By the time the August ExCo paper is presented, close to nine months will have passed since that exercise concluded. That gap matters. As OpenFalklands has argued before, the strongest negotiating leverage existed when the PME concluded, and interested operators were actively engaged. Every month that passes without a decision allows that interest to significantly cool and makes the possibility of replacing the incumbent progressively harder, regardless of what the original PME findings showed.
The warning of what happens without a decision is not hypothetical. Sure’s exclusive licence on St Helena expired in December 2025, and six months later the visible outcome has been continuity by default rather than change, with residents still reporting the same buffering and connection problems as before. FIG has itself signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Government of St Helena, according to FIG’s CEO, to share information between the two territories, so this precedent is not obscure to FIG officials; it is already part of the conversation. The Falklands cannot afford to discover the same lesson the hard way. The first test of the August paper must therefore be whether it finally commits FIG to serving formal notice on Sure, and says when that notice will be served. Without notice, the existing contractual position remains in place, and the transition process cannot properly begin. It must then set out a specific, published timetable for re-engaging the market, so that nine months of cooling interest does not turn into another year of delay.
An “international process” was promised by the FIG Chief Executive in her response to the Connected Falklands Group’s open letter. With the previous Preliminary Market Engagement process now concluded, who will design and manage this new international process? A credible international market exercise requires more than issuing procurement documents: it requires specialist telecommunications expertise, knowledge of the international operator market and the ability to engage directly with potential participants. Will FIG appoint another specialist telecommunications adviser to provide that capability, or does it intend to manage the process internally?
Test 4: What Happens When Commercial Incentives and the Islands’ Needs Diverge?
Sure’s mobile network has been upgraded twice in the past ten weeks, increasing the maximum download speed from 12 Mbit/s to 50 Mbit/s. That is a genuine improvement. Fixed broadband, however, remains capped at 15Mbit/s, while Starlink offers substantially higher speeds and unlimited data.
Plausible technical reasons explain the difference. Fixed and mobile broadband place different demands on Sure’s finite satellite capacity, while Stanley’s ageing ADSL2 network may itself constrain fixed speeds without substantial new investment. The contrast therefore does not prove anything about Sure’s commercial motives.
But the pattern still matters. Fixed broadband, where Starlink has already taken a significant share of the market, has seen no comparable improvement. Mobile, where Sure currently faces no meaningful alternative provider, has been upgraded twice in ten weeks. Whatever the reasons for that difference, it demonstrates why the post-2027 framework cannot simply leave the direction and timing of essential investment to an operator’s own commercial priorities.
The August paper must therefore show how the proposed business framework will create the right incentives and obligations across the whole telecommunications market. Whether through competition, enforceable investment commitments, effective regulation, or a combination of all three, it needs to ensure that essential infrastructure and services improve where the Islands need them to, rather than simply where an operator independently decides there is a commercial case for investment.
A Reminder, Not Just a Retrospective
These four tests are deliberately specific and deliberately measurable. They are not asking MLAs to take a position on which business model FIG should choose; that is a legitimate matter for ExCo to weigh. They are asking MLAs to hold whatever proposal is presented to a consistent, evidence-based standard: who pays and on what timetable; what evidence of genuine change exists beyond words; whether notice will finally be served and the international market re-engaged with real urgency; and whether the framework will require investment across the whole network rather than leaving essential investment to an operator’s own commercial priorities.
It is also worth remembering that ExCo is not obliged to accept an officer recommendation simply because it is placed before them. Whatever comes before ExCo on August 25th, and however strongly it is recommended, MLAs retain both the authority and the responsibility to ask harder questions on behalf of the community and reach a different conclusion if the evidence does not support what is proposed. That is precisely why independent Assembly scrutiny, including through a Select Committee, remains important, even though MLAs do not.
The community that organised the Starlink petition, that responded to the FIDC survey in record numbers, and that has followed these issues in growing numbers over the past year will also be looking closely at what emerges from ExCo. These four tests provide a straightforward way of judging it. They deserve clear, publicly available answers from the August paper, from those recommending it, and ultimately from the MLAs who must decide what business model represents the right future for Falkland Islands telecommunications.
Chris Gare, OpenFalklands, August 2026, copyright OpenFalklands
