Beihai, China

Beihai: Submarine Cable Landing Point

Beihai is a prefecture-level city located in the south of Guangxi, China, situated on the north shore of the Gulf of Tonkin. As a coastal city with established port infrastructure, Beihai serves as a landing point for submarine cable connectivity. One submarine cable lands at Beihai, connecting it to another point on the Chinese coast and placing it within the domestic submarine cable network of China.

The single cable landing here, the Haikou-Beihai Cable, links Beihai to Haikou in Hainan province, forming a domestic intra-China corridor. This connection runs along the Gulf of Tonkin and represents a short-haul, inter-city submarine link rather than an intercontinental route. Beihai's role as a submarine cable landing point is therefore oriented toward domestic coastal connectivity.

Cables Landing at Beihai

The Haikou-Beihai Cable is the sole submarine cable landing at Beihai. The cable spans 198 kilometres and reached its ready-for-service date in 1999, making it one of the earlier submarine cables to be deployed in China, where the first cables became operational from 1997 onward. Both endpoints of this cable are located in China, with the cable connecting Beihai to Haikou, the capital city of Hainan Island. The Haikou-Beihai Cable is currently listed with draft status.

Regional Context

Within China's submarine cable landscape, Beihai hosts one cable across the country's 24 landing points, placing it among the more modestly served locations in the national network. By comparison, landing points such as Chung Hom Kok and Tseung Kwan O each host six cables, while Chongming and Nanhui host four and Shantou hosts three, reflecting significantly higher cable concentrations at those sites. Beihai ranks within the top 63 percent of Chinese landing points by cable count, indicating that while it is not among the most heavily connected nodes, it is not an outlier within the broader national picture.

Network Role

Beihai functions as a single-cable terminus within the Chinese submarine cable network, supporting a domestic route that crosses the Gulf of Tonkin to reach Hainan Island. The Haikou-Beihai Cable, at 198 kilometres, is considerably shorter than the national average cable length of 10,860 kilometres recorded across Chinese landing points, underscoring its role as a regional coastal link rather than a long-distance international connection. The cable does not extend beyond Chinese territory, and Beihai's function is therefore limited to enabling domestic inter-city submarine bandwidth between Guangxi and Hainan.

In the regional submarine cable graph for China, Beihai represents a single-link node connecting a major southern coastal city on the mainland to Hainan Island, contributing to the redundancy and diversity of routes serving that island province from the Guangxi coastline.