Kacific and Microsoft’s 750-Hub Bet Comes Due Without a Tally

Kacific Broadband Satellites Group and Microsoft promised high-speed satellite links to 750 rural schools and clinics, a coverage circle they put at 10 million people in two years. The 8 April 2024 pledge used Ka-band beams from the Kacific1 satellite across seven Asia-Pacific countries.

Community Wi-Fi was meant to spread from those schools and clinics. The two-year window closed in April 2026, and neither company has published a site-by-site count.

A Two-Year Bet on 750 School and Clinic Dishes

The Kacific statement, dated Singapore, 8 April 2024, said the companies would bring high-speed satellite internet to 750 rural educational and healthcare institutions with a geographical coverage of 10 million over the next two years. The list was Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, the Cook Islands, Samoa and Timor-Leste. Those buildings would, in turn, connect the communities around them.

That is a coverage claim, not a subscriber count. Ten million people spread across 750 sites is about 13,333 people per site if the circle is filled. The hardware plan was more modest: a dish on a school or clinic, then a Wi-Fi hotspot aimed at the settlement around it, with as little overlap as possible.

Kacific’s Corporate Development Director, Beatrice Mok, said sites were chosen “to ensure minimal overlapping coverage between the Wi-Fi hotspots (across both schools and clinics) and maximum population coverage in areas where the need is identified.” She also said Kacific looks at community size, what the site needs, and what it can afford, “to ensure each site benefits as many people as possible in a sustainable manner.”

The capacity sits on Kacific1, a geostationary high-throughput satellite whose own briefing slides, hosted by the Pacific Region Infrastructure Facility, describe 56 Ka-band spot beams, 60 Gbps of bandwidth, a 15-year design life, 99.97% availability, and gateways in Australia, the Philippines and Indonesia.

Microsoft folded the work into Airband, the company’s long-running push to pair internet providers, energy firms, governments and nonprofits. Vickie Robinson, then general manager of Airband, called internet access “a fundamental right, enabling economic opportunity for people, businesses, and governments,” and said the Kacific work used satellite to reach communities that had limited or no conventional links.

THE PARTNERSHIP CLOCK

1. 5 December 2023: An APNIC Foundation grant period opens for a separate Kacific build of education and health terminals in the Pacific, with Beatrice Mok as project leader.
2. 16 February 2024: Installations on that grant begin.
3. 8 April 2024: Kacific and Microsoft announce the 750-site Airband project and the 10 million coverage figure.
4. 1 September 2025: The APNIC-funded build of 100 terminals is marked complete.
5. 24 February 2026: Microsoft says it has extended connectivity coverage to over 299 million people worldwide and announces a new collaboration with Starlink.
6. April 2026: The two-year window on the 750-site pledge closes with no public site roster from either company.

On 12 August 2024, Kacific’s own account was still describing the school work as a live partnership with GuarantCo and Microsoft, with no running tally attached. A year after the launch, a 7 April 2025 company post still used “we aim to connect 750” rather than a completed count.

Palawan’s 12-Bed Infirmary Is the Public Proof

The specimen Kacific put on the launch was Palawan Baptist Hospital in the Philippines, a 12-bed infirmary that had been running PhilHealth’s electronic claims system over signal boosters, pocket Wi-Fi and prepaid sticks. Claims only move online, so a dropped link was a billing problem as well as a clinical one.

Local installers named by Kacific were ISP partner BambuNet and distributor Ros3 I.T. Services. After the Kacific1 link went in, the company said hospital efficiency improved, transfers between facilities got cleaner, and costs for patients fell by about half because families no longer had to travel for hours to reach friends and relatives. Telemedicine, the company later added, became possible.

Better internet access and streamlined communication for hospital transfers go hand in hand.

Darren Jay Gacot, Head of Marketing, Communications and IT, Palawan Baptist Hospital

That is a distance story more than a megabit story. Palawan is a long island with thin roads. A 12-bed ward that can file claims and call a referral hospital is doing work a fibre build in Manila never has to do. It is also a small building. It cannot, on its own, carry 13,333 people in a coverage circle. Kacific’s own case video is the clearest look at what one of these hubs actually is.

The hospital is the honest unit of the bet: one dish, one clinic, one set of staff who keep the bill paid. Scale was supposed to come from repeating that pattern 750 times and letting Wi-Fi leak into the yard.

100 Terminals on a $150,000 Pacific Grant

The only education-and-health build Kacific has put into an independent completion report is not the Microsoft 750. It is a grant from the APNIC Foundation, titled Connecting 100 educational institutions and healthcare facilities, worth USD 150,000. That is $1,500 of grant money per terminal before anyone pays for traffic.

The report, covering 5 December 2023 to 30 November 2025, says Kacific deployed 100 satellite broadband terminals in the Cook Islands, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Timor-Leste, Tonga and Vanuatu, working with Vodafone and IslandTech Solomon Islands. Completions ran from 16 February 2024 to 1 September 2025. Direct users are put at about 10,000 students, teachers, health workers and patients. Indirect community use is put at about 30,000.

The split is 96 schools and 4 healthcare facilities. Each school site is described as serving around 100 students and teachers, or about 9,600 people on the education side. The 4 clinics are described as serving around 400 direct beneficiaries. Those two figures add to the 10,000 direct total.

Tonga is on the grant list and not on the Microsoft seven. The Philippines and Samoa are on the Microsoft seven and not on the grant list. The projects overlap in five countries and should not be added together as if they were one roster.

TWO BUILDS, TWO SCOREBOARDS

At APNIC density, 100 people directly served per school site is two orders of magnitude below the 13,333-per-site coverage math on the Microsoft pledge. The grant report is also blunt about money after the dish is bolted down. Terminals were sponsored. The monthly traffic bill was not, and that bill decides whether the link stays up.

Despite the sponsorship of the terminals, the ongoing cost of the internet service is critical to these institutions in the Pacific Islands. Our recommendation for others looking to undertake similar future projects is to also look to engage local ministries and authorities on subsidising the ongoing internet costs (not free, but lowered), or look into lower bandwidth internet with unlimited data caps at a very low price, however this could mean that the speeds might not be as meaningful for their usage.

Kacific Broadband Satellites Ltd, APNIC Foundation technical report

The same report suggests a local cache so a classroom can keep using lessons if the shared pipe slows, and literacy training, especially for women and youth, so the link is actually used. Local ISPs did the surveys, the installs, first-line repair and bill collection. Headmasters and clinic directors were named as the people who keep paying. That is the hidden payroll of the model Microsoft was buying: not a Redmond NOC, a shop on the island that can get a boat to the site.

How Far Does a Clinic Hub’s Signal Reach?

Each APNIC site used a Jonsa 1.2 metre antenna, an MDM2010 iDirect Evolution modem, a 2W block upconverter, and a ruggedized Wi-Fi access point rated for indoor and outdoor cover up to 200 metres. The shared profile was speeds up to 40 Mbps for several users on one premise. Install, align and test took one to two days once the crate was on the ground. Getting the crate there often meant a boat or a charter flight.

WHAT SAT ON EACH GRANT SITE

• Antenna: A Jonsa 1.2 metre dish locked to Kacific1.
• Indoor chain: An MDM2010 iDirect Evolution modem and a 2W block upconverter.
• Last metres: A ruggedized Wi-Fi point specified up to 200 metres, indoor or outdoor.
• Pipe: A shared profile of speeds up to 40 Mbps for several users at one site.
• Labour: One to two days on site after the terminal had been shipped in batches.

Two hundred metres of Wi-Fi from a rural schoolyard is a village tool. It is not a provincial network. Beatrice Mok’s no-overlap rule makes sense in that light: each dish is a small circle, so the planners were packing circles onto settlements rather than selling home broadband to 10 million premises. Students on the grant, the report says, had been taking half a day to reach a town just to get online for assignments. Teachers used the new links for admissions work, government portals and video lessons.

One photographed install is named: Suena Community High School. That is the texture the 10 million figure does not carry. A named school, a 1.2 metre dish, a 200 metre hotspot, a headmaster who holds the invoice.

Starlink and the Partners Who Walked

The APNIC report records a market event the 2024 Microsoft release never had to face. Telecom Fiji and Vodafone Vanuatu had been in the original plan for the 100 education and health sites. Both pulled out when Starlink became an option, the report says, even though the project was offering free terminals and free installation on Kacific.

That is a partner problem, not a beam problem. Kacific1 was already on station. The local companies that walk the ridgeline and collect the monthly fee chose a different satellite. A 2026 review of Pacific satellite access in Asia and the Pacific Policy Studies lists Starlink alongside Kacific1 in several of the same states named in April 2024, including the Cook Islands, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. In the Solomon Islands, the same review notes a 2025 government-funded link to four remote schools in North Vella La Vella.

GEO Ka-band community hubs and LEO home terminals now sit on the same island maps. Microsoft’s 2024 Pacific bet was a GEO community-Wi-Fi design sold through local ISPs. By the time the two-year window ended, the same company was standing up Starlink as a digital-access tool of its own.

Microsoft Closed Its Global Books at 299 Million

On 24 February 2026, Melanie Nakagawa, Microsoft’s chief sustainability officer, wrote that the company had met and beaten a 2022 promise to expand internet access to 250 million people by the end of 2025. The new figure was connectivity coverage to over 299 million people worldwide, including more than 124 million across Africa. She cited International Telecommunication Union figures putting the global offline population at 2.2 billion.

As part of this next chapter, we are announcing a new collaboration with Starlink. This collaboration expands the set of tools available to help deliver digital access in rural, agricultural, and hard-to-reach communities.

Melanie Nakagawa, Chief Sustainability Officer, Microsoft, 24 February 2026

The same post describes community-based access through schools, health facilities, cooperatives and hubs, which is the shape of the Kacific design. It does not publish a 750-site roster, and it does not assign any slice of the 299 million to Kacific1. Coverage is the word Microsoft chose, as geographical coverage was the word Kacific chose in 2024.

The old Airband web page now forwards into a “Sustainable and Connected Communities” brief that repeats the 299 million coverage figure. The Pacific 750, as a numbered promise, is not on that scoreboard.

In Papua New Guinea, Only 19 Percent Use the Internet

World Bank series on internet use across East Asia and the Pacific, drawn from ITU indicators, put the regional rate at 88 percent in 2025. The seven countries on the Kacific-Microsoft list sit far apart, and two of the Pacific readings are old enough that they should be read as dated, not current.

INTERNET USE IN THE NAMED COUNTRIES

Papua New Guinea at 19 percent in 2024, and the Solomon Islands at 29 percent the same year, are the hard end of the list. The Philippines, at 67 percent, is a different market with a Palawan-shaped hole. Cook Islands has no figure in that World Bank extract. Samoa’s 21 percent reading is from 2014 and Vanuatu’s 22 percent is from 2015, so they cannot be used as a 2026 snapshot; they only show how thin the official trail still is.

A dish on a clinic does not move those percentages by itself. It can cut a half-day walk for a student, file a PhilHealth claim, or hold a referral call. Whether 750 of those dishes were lit, and whether the Wi-Fi around them stayed paid after the speeches, is the part of the April 2024 bet that still has no public ledger.

Microsoft’s global coverage figure moved to 299 million in February 2026, and Starlink is now named in that same digital-access kit. Kacific’s grant report had already logged two Pacific operators walking away from free GEO terminals. The 750-site, 10 million coverage pledge closed its two-year window in April 2026 without a published count of dishes on roofs.