Maria Chiquita, Panama

Maria Chiquita, Panama is one of the most connected submarine cable landing points in Panama. 4 international cable systems come ashore here, and together they reach 17 other countries across the Caribbean and Central America, South America and North America.

Why cable lands at Maria Chiquita

Its 4 systems give Maria Chiquita direct international reach to Bahamas, Belize, Colombia and Costa Rica and beyond (17 countries in all), the role that justified building international cable here rather than routing through an inland neighbour.

Where its cables reach

• ARCOS, MANTA, Pacific Caribbean Cable System (PCCS) and TAM-1 connect it to North America (United States).
• ARCOS, MANTA, Pacific Caribbean Cable System (PCCS) and TAM-1 connect it to the Caribbean and Central America (including Bahamas, Belize, Costa Rica, Curaçao, Dominican Republic).
• ARCOS, MANTA, Pacific Caribbean Cable System (PCCS) and TAM-1 connect it to South America (Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador).

The systems in detail

The roster spans 27 years of build-out, from ARCOS (2001) to MANTA (2028). Documented capacity and vintage vary across the roster: ARCOS (8,704 km and in service since 2001), MANTA (5,600 km and in service since 2028), Pacific Caribbean Cable System (PCCS) (6,163 km and in service since 2015) and TAM-1 (7,200 km and in service since 2026). Facts for every system are on its own cable page.

What the concentration means for resilience

With 4 independent systems, Panama has real redundancy through this point: no single cable cut isolates it from the destinations they share. Because these systems share the same short stretch of coast and shore infrastructure, a localized event at the landing zone can reach far more capacity than the cable count alone suggests. GeoCables tracks each of these systems individually for exactly this reason.

What our monitoring has recorded

GeoCables watches these systems continuously rather than describing them once. Since 2026-03-10 we have logged 122 route anomalies across 68 cable systems worldwide. None of the systems landing here has triggered a route anomaly in that window, a stability signal in its own right for a hub of this size. This section updates automatically the moment that changes, as it already has for the 68 other systems flagged across our coverage.

Latency, measured

From the GeoCables probe network, best-case round-trip time to Panama endpoints runs about 189 ms from Moscow, about 182 ms from Jerusalem and about 182 ms from Minsk. These are paths into Panama from our own vantage points, not a global average, and they shift as operators re-route.

Who depends on it

The largest access networks in Panama sit behind this coastal capacity: Cable & Wireless Panama (45.6% of users), Cable Onda (40.4% of users), Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (1.3% of users) and GALAXY ENTERTAINMENT DE VENEZUELA, S.C.A. (1.3% of users). See the full national picture for Panama.

In short, Maria Chiquita, Panama carries international traffic for Panama across 4 independent cable systems reaching 17 countries on 3 continents, and GeoCables monitors each of them in real time.