Bahamas

Submarine connectivity overview

The Bahamas sits at a geographic crossroads in the western Atlantic, its chain of islands stretching across some 1,400 kilometres of ocean between Florida and Hispaniola. That position places the archipelago within reach of several major cable corridors linking North America to the Caribbean and Latin America — an advantage the country's connectivity profile reflects, at least in part.

Three active submarine cable systems serve the Bahamas: ARCOS-1, BAHAMAS 2, and BICS. Each represents a distinct investment in connectivity, and their coexistence suggests the country is not entirely dependent on a single route or operator — a basic but important form of resilience for any island nation.

The cable mix

ARCOS-1 is a regional system that loops through the Caribbean and connects to multiple landing points across Central America, the Gulf of Mexico coast, and South America. Its presence in the Bahamas ties the country into one of the more extensive regional cable rings in the Caribbean basin.

BAHAMAS 2, as its name implies, is a system with a more focused mandate, likely oriented toward connecting Bahamian territory directly to a major hub — almost certainly the United States eastern seaboard given the proximity — rather than serving a broader multi-country route.

BICS adds a third strand to this picture. The presence of three discrete systems provides a degree of redundancy that many smaller Caribbean island states lack, where a single cable fault can degrade national internet performance measurably.

Geography and its constraints

Archipelago geography complicates the story. The Bahamas comprises more than 700 islands and cays, and submarine cable infrastructure rarely reaches all inhabited points in such dispersed national territories. Connectivity on outlying islands and Family Islands is likely supplemented by satellite links or microwave backhaul, with the submarine cable systems anchoring bandwidth primarily at major population centres.

No cable landing point locations within the Bahamas are documented in this register. The physical locations where these three systems make landfall — and which islands they directly serve — remain to be confirmed. That gap matters: landing point diversity across the archipelago would be a meaningful indicator of how broadly the benefits of submarine connectivity are distributed across the country's geography.

Register status

Landing point documentation for the Bahamas is ongoing. Readers with verified landing station data are encouraged to contribute through the site's submission process.