The digital side of the Belt and Road Initiative is growing

ONE TROPICAL evening in November, the 9,800-tonne Ile de Bréhat slipped from the quay at Honiara, capital of the Solomon Islands, and steamed out of Iron Bottom Sound. For weeks the boat had been a familiar sight as it finished its job of laying 4,700km of fibre-optic cable from Sydney to Honiara on Guadalcanal and 730km among the main outlying islands, with another branch heading to Port Moresby, capital of neighbouring Papua New Guinea. Less than a fifth of Solomon Islanders have access to the internet. The Ile de Bréhat is about to transform more lives than any ship since the Los Reyes, the first European vessel to discover the islands, in 1567.