Antofagasta, Chile

Antofagasta, Chile: Submarine Cable Landing Point

Antofagasta is a port city on the Pacific coast of northern Chile, situated approximately 1,100 kilometres north of Santiago. As the capital of both Antofagasta Province and Antofagasta Region, it is one of Chile's most significant urban centres, with a population of 401,096 recorded in the 2024 census. One submarine cable lands at Antofagasta, connecting it to Chile's broader undersea cable network along the South American Pacific coast.

The cable serving Antofagasta is the Prat system, a domestic Chilean cable that links coastal communities along the country's extended Pacific shoreline. With a single cable terminus, Antofagasta functions as a point-to-point landing in the Chilean intra-national submarine cable corridor rather than as a multi-cable hub.

Cables Landing at Antofagasta, Chile

Prat is a submarine cable system measuring 3,500 kilometres in length, with a ready-for-service (RFS) year of 2020. The Prat cable connects landing points exclusively within Chile, making it a domestic inter-city system along the Chilean Pacific coast. It represents the sole submarine cable connection serving Antofagasta, linking the northern port city into Chile's coastal cable infrastructure.

Regional Context

Within Chile's submarine cable landscape, which spans 9 cables across 19 landing points, Antofagasta hosts a single cable alongside a small group of similarly positioned single-cable landing points that include Caldera, Cartagena, and Constitución. By cable count, Antofagasta ranks in the same tier as these single-cable peers, well behind the leading hub at Valparaíso, which hosts six cables, and Arica in the country's far north, which hosts three. Antofagasta's position as a major northern city is reflected in its inclusion in the Prat domestic network, which connects it to Chile's broader coastal cable system.

Network Role

Antofagasta's role in the submarine cable graph is that of a single-cable domestic terminus. The Prat cable, running 3,500 kilometres along Chile's Pacific coast, enables connectivity between Antofagasta and other Chilean coastal landing points, supporting intra-national data transmission within one of the world's longest and most geographically stretched countries. As a port city in Chile's north, Antofagasta's inclusion on the Prat system extends domestic submarine cable reach into a region that would otherwise depend entirely on terrestrial networks.

Within the Chilean submarine cable graph, Antofagasta occupies a defined but limited position - a single-cable node in a national coastal system - highlighting how Chile's elongated geography distributes submarine cable landings across numerous coastal cities, each serving as a distinct point of access on the country's Pacific-facing network.