Iceland
Iceland's international connectivity runs through a single documented landing point on its east coast, served by three active submarine cables spanning decades of infrastructure investment and linking the island toward Europe and North America.
Connectivity at a glance
- Cable systems
- 3active
- Landing points
- 1
- Resilience score
- 30
Cable systems serving Iceland
| Cable | Status | Ready for service | Length | Design capacity |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CANTAT-3 | active | 1994 }} | — | 2.5 Gigabit/Second |
| FARICE-1 | active | }} | 1,205 km | 720Gbit/s |
| Greenland Connect | active | — | — | — |
Landing points
- item1_value=1 | 1 = Seyðisfjörður, Icelanditem1_value=1 | 1 = Seyðisfjörður
A North Atlantic Crossroads
Iceland sits at an unusual intersection of the North Atlantic, close enough to both Europe and Greenland to serve as a waypoint in cables that otherwise face long, exposed ocean runs. That geography has shaped how the island connects — not through a cluster of landing stations spread around its coastline, but through a single documented landing point at Seyðisfjörður, a fjord town on the eastern seaboard.
The Cable Mix
Three active submarine cables serve Iceland. CANTAT-3, the oldest of the three, has been in service since 1994 and represents one of the earlier transatlantic cable systems still operating. Its continued activity is notable given the pace at which older cables are typically retired; it speaks to either sustained demand or an absence of ready replacement capacity. FARICE-1, running 1,205 km, connects Iceland toward the Faroe Islands and onwards to Scotland, providing a European corridor distinct from a direct transatlantic path. Greenland Connect, as its name suggests, extends the network in the other direction, linking Iceland toward Greenland and completing a chain across the high North Atlantic.
Capacity and Resilience
The concentration of all three cables at Seyðisfjörður creates a structural vulnerability that the number of cables alone does not resolve. Diversity in cable count means little if every system makes landfall at the same coastal facility. A single incident — whether physical damage at the landing station, a cable cut close to shore, or a natural event affecting the fjord approach — could simultaneously affect all three systems. For an island nation with no terrestrial fallback, that concentration warrants attention.
At the same time, the three cables do represent distinct routes. FARICE-1 runs southeast toward Europe, Greenland Connect runs northwest, and CANTAT-3 provides a transatlantic dimension. Route diversity, even when landing points converge, offers some protection against mid-ocean faults and means that a cut on one segment does not automatically darken all paths.
Geography as Constraint
Iceland's remoteness in the North Atlantic makes submarine cables the only practical medium for high-capacity international connectivity. The island's sparse population is distributed around a volcanic interior, and Seyðisfjörður's position on the east coast reflects the shorter cable distances to Europe from that shore. Any future expansion of the landing point network, or any new cable proposals, would likely need to navigate both the logistical difficulty of Iceland's coastal terrain and the economics of serving a relatively small market at the edge of the inhabited North Atlantic.