Seychelles is connected. Three international submarine fibre-optic cables link the islands to global internet infrastructure. 4G/LTE networks cover nearly the entire population. Internet usage has risen from under 70% in 2018 to 88% in 2024. By the headline measures of digital connectivity, the country has made significant and sustained progress.
And yet more than 60% of Seychelles firms report frequent internet disruptions. Around 40% of those firms estimate that disruptions cost them between 1 and 20% of sales. One in ten reports losses above 5%. These are not the figures of a connected economy. They are the figures of an economy where the infrastructure exists but does not reliably work.
The gap between those two realities, between the infrastructure that has been built and the service quality firms actually experience, is where a significant and underexamined cost to Seychelles' economic growth is sitting.
What the disruption data shows
The World Bank Enterprise Survey (2023) places Seychelles' internet disruption rate above every structural and aspirational peer country measured. Barbados, Mauritius, Malta, Estonia, Singapore, all report lower incidence rates. Among the peer group, Seychelles is an outlier, and not in the direction its digital ambitions require.
The sales loss estimates attached to those disruptions are conservative by design, firms estimating their own losses tend to report the floor, not the ceiling. At the lower bound of the 1–20% range, across an economy where digital channels are becoming increasingly central to service delivery, tourism booking, financial transactions, and government compliance, the aggregate cost is material. At the upper bound, it represents a structural drag on firm productivity that no amount of digital adoption programming can compensate for if the underlying connectivity is unreliable.
Speed compounds the problem. Actual broadband performance in Seychelles lags peer countries by a significant margin. Median fixed broadband speeds in Malta, an aspirational peer of comparable island geography, are nearly five times higher. The combination of frequent disruption and low speeds does not simply inconvenience firms. It determines what digital activities are viable for them. A firm that cannot rely on a stable connection for video calls, cloud-based software, or online payment processing is not a firm that can meaningfully participate in a digital economy.
Why the problem persists
The infrastructure constraint is not primarily a cable or coverage problem. Seychelles has the international connectivity. The constraint sits in the middle mile, the segment of network between the international gateway and the end user, where market concentration and the absence of effective infrastructure sharing have allowed some to maintain control of pricing and service quality without sufficient competitive pressure.
Vertically integrated operators control gateway, backbone, and last-mile infrastructure simultaneously. Smaller providers face high access costs with limited recourse. The result is a market where the conditions for competition exist in policy but not in practice, and where the regulatory authority responsible for enforcing quality of service standards has operated without the capacity to systematically assess operator cost structures or mandate compliance.
The Communications Act (2023) grants the Seychelles Communications Regulatory Authority the powers needed to address this, authority to regulate wholesale tariffs, require non-discriminatory infrastructure access, and enforce quality of service standards. Those powers have not yet been deployed at the scale the market requires. The gap between the legislative framework and its implementation is where service quality problems are sustained.
What it means for the broader reform agenda
Internet reliability is not a standalone infrastructure question. It is a dependency that runs through every other element of Seychelles' digital transformation.
Digital government services that require a reliable connection to complete a transaction cannot achieve meaningful adoption if a significant share of the population and business community experiences frequent outages. The trust deficit that already surrounds online public services deepens every time a citizen attempts to use a digital channel and encounters an error caused not by the service itself but by the connection dropping mid-process.
The Digital Adoption Programme for SMEs, a central component of the national digital strategy — assumes that small businesses have access to connectivity sufficient to operate digital tools, online platforms, and payment systems. For the 60% of firms currently reporting regular disruptions, that assumption does not hold. Financial support and technical assistance for digital adoption produce limited returns if the infrastructure required to use what firms adopt is itself unreliable.
Seychelles' ambition to position itself as a regional digital hub rests on a similar foundation. Cross-border digital services, fintech operations, and data-intensive knowledge sector activity require connectivity that regional competitors cannot match on quality grounds. Mauritius has used stronger broadband performance and more effective enforcement of competition policy to establish itself as the Indian Ocean's leading ICT and business services hub. The distance between the two countries on this measure is not geographic. It is regulatory.
What closing the gap requires
The path to reliable, competitively priced broadband in Seychelles runs through three actions that are distinct but interdependent.
The first is enforcement. The SCRA holds the powers it needs. Deploying them - through systematic quality of service monitoring, cost-based wholesale pricing requirements, and escalating penalties for repeated violations - changes the incentive structure for dominant operators without requiring new legislation.
The second is structural separation. Requiring dominant operators to separate wholesale infrastructure costs from retail services creates the transparency needed for effective regulatory oversight and gives smaller providers a viable basis on which to compete. This is not a novel intervention. It is the standard approach in the peer markets - Malta, Estonia, Mauritius - where broadband performance significantly outpaces Seychelles.
The third is forward-looking spectrum policy. The recent licensing of Starlink for low-earth orbit satellite services introduces a new competitive dynamic, particularly for outer island connectivity where fixed broadband infrastructure is thinnest. Maximising that competitive effect requires a spectrum allocation and management framework that supports new entrants rather than protecting incumbents.
None of these actions require building new infrastructure. The cables are in the ground. The towers are up. The legislative authority exists. What is required is the regulatory will to use it, and the analytical rigour to measure whether it is working.
An economy that cannot reliably connect its firms to the internet is not yet a digital economy. It is an economy with digital infrastructure. The distance between those two things is measurable. So is the cost of leaving it unaddressed.
Much can be done to improve the connectivity of the islands, as well as the commercial successes of the present businesses offering it - only through a shared vision and sense of purpose.
