Throughout the inhabited life of the Falklands, keeping up with the news and with your neighbours has been done in many ways and has followed technological developments in the rest of the world. However challenges including distance; the lack of an undersea cable to connect us to fast Internet (the obvious place to connect to would be Argentina, so don’t hold your breath); communicating to dispersed farms and settlements; means that communications still have their own unique flavour.

There is a postal service – it receives and send external mail from the UK on the Airbridge; it sorts internal Falklands mail; it distributes post to Camp with FIGAS; in Stanley it keeps your post in a PO box until you come and collect it, when you remember. In fact many people have their post delivered to their employer’s PO Box, rather than having one of their own.

There are landlines and a mobile phone network, but you can quickly lose signal. As a result there is a 2 meter VHF radio network in use across the Islands and it is sufficiently important that there was major investment in it as recently as 2021. These days it’s not used for doctor’s appointments and nor do children have their GCSE results read out for the whole network to hear, but it is still an important communication link.

The Islands are connected to the Internet and have been for many years but it is via satellite, so it is slow and expensive. It’s faster than it was the first time I came but it’s much slower than normal. Also there’s no such thing as an unlimited data package here, every byte of data has to be paid for, which really concentrates the mind on what you want to use it for.

However, the Internet exists and the communication it enables still feels like a marvel to me. When I was growing up and my father was away with the Royal Navy, the communication method of choice was letters and postcards which took weeks to arrive. When I travelled in Peru in the mid 2000s – I could email from an Internet cafe or on special occasions I could find an international phone shop and make an expensive call home. Now I can use any number of devices and apps to call friends and family, as if they were only a short distance away. I wonder what’s next?