Welcome to the first issue of Enterprizit. Every week we cover the technology and business of the Pacific Islands — the founders, the funding, the policy, and the companies building the region's digital economy. No one else does this weekly. We're going to.

Here's where I want to start, because it sets up everything else we'll cover: this month, NEC finished building the East Micronesia Cable System, a roughly 2,250km submarine cable linking the Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati and Nauru. For Nauru, it is the country's first undersea cable, full stop. Until now, Nauru and Kiribati ran most of their internet over satellite.

It is tempting to file this under "infrastructure news" and move on. Don't. For a Pacific tech ecosystem, the cable is the ecosystem's ceiling. Every fintech app, every cloud-hosted SaaS product, every founder who wants to hire remotely or sell across borders is, in the end, limited by the pipe. Satellite links mean latency and instability — workable for email, painful for video calls and real-time payments. A fibre landing changes what is buildable locally. The reason you can plausibly start a payments startup in Honiara in 2026 and not in 2016 is, more than anything else, the cable map.

So the question I'd put to every founder and every official reading this: when redundancy and bandwidth arrive in your country, what becomes possible that wasn't before? The cable is the input. The output is up to the ecosystem — and that's the thing this newsletter exists to track.

That's the lens for Enterprizit. Infrastructure first, because it is the constraint. Then the companies that grow inside what the infrastructure allows.

If this is useful, the best thing you can do is forward it to one person building or funding something in the Pacific. That's how this grows.

Micronesia, Kiribati and Nauru come online. NEC handed over the East Micronesia Cable System this month — about 2,250km of fibre connecting Kosrae (FSM), Tarawa (Kiribati) and Nauru, funded by Australia, Japan and the United States. It's the first subsea cable for Nauru and the first for Kosrae. The practical upshot: more stable video calls and electronic payments in three places that until now leaned on satellite. Why it matters: this is the new floor for what local digital businesses in those markets can build.

Solomon Islands lines up a second route. Australia and the Solomon Islands are progressing the Adamasia Cable System, which would give Honiara a second international link. The significance is redundancy — several Pacific nations still depend on a single cable, meaning one fault can mean a long national outage. A second route is the difference between "the internet is slow today" and "the internet is gone this week." Why it matters: redundancy is what lets a business depend on being online.

The startup pipeline is real, and it's regional. Last year's Pacific Tech Village at VivaTech in Paris drew more than 80 applications from 17 Pacific countries and territories to fill 15 slots. That ratio is the number to watch — it says there are far more founders than there are stages to put them on. Why it matters: the deal flow exists; the regional infrastructure to support it is the bottleneck.

PNG's ride-hailing story keeps scaling. Odesh, the Port Moresby on-demand taxi platform, has been operating a fleet in the hundreds and has served transport to a large share of the city. It's a reminder that the most successful Pacific startups so far solve a concrete local logistics problem rather than chase a global category. Why it matters: "boring" local problems are where Pacific traction is actually coming from.