Crooked Island, Bahamas

Crooked Island, Bahamas: Submarine Cable Landing Point

Crooked Island is an island and district in the Bahamas, situated in the southern part of the archipelago at the northern edge of the Bight of Acklins, a large shallow lagoon shared with Acklins Island to the south-east. As a submarine cable landing point, Crooked Island connects the Bahamas to a broad arc of Caribbean and Central American nations through a single international cable system. That single cable, ARCOS, links Crooked Island into a regional corridor spanning from the broader Caribbean basin through to Central and South American coastlines.

One submarine cable lands at Crooked Island: ARCOS, a long-distance system that runs 8,704 kilometres and connects multiple nations across the Caribbean Sea and Central America. Its presence here extends the Bahamian submarine cable network into one of the more geographically extensive cable systems operating in the Caribbean region.

Cables Landing at Crooked Island, Bahamas

ARCOS is an 8,704-kilometre submarine cable system that became ready for service in 2001. It connects a wide range of territories and nations, with landing points across the Bahamas, Belize, Colombia, Costa Rica, Curaçao, and the Dominican Republic. Through this cable, Crooked Island is directly linked to countries spanning the eastern Caribbean, the Colombian coast, the Central American isthmus, and the island of Curaçao in the southern Caribbean. ARCOS represents a Caribbean-wide and Caribbean-to-Central-America connectivity corridor, making Crooked Island a terminus node on a broadly regional submarine cable network.

Regional Context

Within the Bahamas, Crooked Island is one of 21 submarine cable landing points distributed across the archipelago. Nassau leads the national landing point hierarchy with three cables, while Cat Island, Eight-Mile Rock, Hawksbill, and Sandy Point each host two cables. Crooked Island, alongside Alice Town, forms part of the single-cable tier of Bahamian landing points, placing it in the upper 76 percent of all Bahamian landing points by cable count.

Network Role

Crooked Island functions as a single-cable terminus on the ARCOS system, connecting the southern Bahamian island chain to a network of Caribbean and Central American nations. The cable's geographic reach — encompassing Belize, Colombia, Costa Rica, Curaçao, and the Dominican Republic alongside the Bahamas — means that this landing point participates in a corridor that crosses both the Caribbean Sea and the approaches to the Central American mainland.

Within the regional submarine cable graph, Crooked Island's role is that of a geographically distinct Bahamian access point on a long-haul, multi-country Caribbean system, extending connectivity beyond the more concentrated landing point cluster found at Nassau into the outer islands of the southern Bahamas.