As of 2024, Iceland's telecom infrastructure is fully digitised and mostly fibre based, with 93% of households having full-fibre availability.
Mobile telecoms in Iceland adheres to the GSM standard and 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G services are available, as well as a TETRA network for emergency communications.
By 1911 a telephone line connected Reykjavik in the west of Iceland to Seyðisfjörður in the east via Akureyri in the north.
The first short-wave radio station was established in Iceland in 1935–36, linking the country up to international radio-telephone services.
In 1962, the SCOTICE (to Scotland) and ICECAN (Canada) coaxial submarine telephone cables were put into use, greatly increasing reliability and capacity of international telephone and telegraph traffic as well as opening up telex services for the first time.
Initially connecting to the Intelsat system, most international telephone and telex traffic now used satellite communications.
By 1987 the older coaxial submarine cables SCOTICE and ICECAN were taken out of use after a secondary backup ground station opened near Höfn in eastern Iceland, leaving Iceland solely dependent on satellite communications for international traffic during this period.
In 1986, mobile telephony was available for the first time using an NMT 1G (first generation) network, followed by GSM services in 1994 and SMS messaging in 1997, followed by MMS in 2003.
In 1994, the first fibre submarine cable, CANTAT-3, reached Iceland linking it to Canada, Germany, UK and Denmark with a capacity of 7.5 Gbit/s.
This greatly increased bandwidth and allowed internet connections to become more widely available.
[4] As bandwidth and reliability demands grew in the 21st century, more fibre submarine cables were launched to Iceland: FARICE in 2003 to the UK and Faroe Islands; DANICE in 2009 to Denmark; Greenland Connect in 2009 to Greenland and Canada and lastly IRIS in 2023 to Ireland.
With multiple redundant submarine fibre routes, the satellite ground station Skyggnir was taken out of use in 2005 and CANTAT-3 became defunct in 2009.
[10] Current internet and telephone services rely on submarine communications cables for external traffic, with a total capacity of 60.2 Tbit/s.
There are no current plans to implement DAB broadcasting, due to ample bandwidth and cost.