Fuvahmulah, Maldives

Fuvahmulah, Maldives: Submarine Cable Landing Point

Fuvahmulah is an island in Gnaviyani Atoll, located in the southern reaches of the Maldives, positioned between Huvadhu Atoll to the north and Seenu Atoll to the south. As one of the more populous islands in the Maldives — ranking third after Malé and Addu — it holds a place in the country's domestic submarine cable infrastructure. One submarine cable lands at Fuvahmulah, connecting it to the broader network that spans the Maldivian archipelago.

The single cable serving Fuvahmulah is the Dhiraagu Cable Network, a domestic system that links multiple landing points within the Maldives. Rather than providing intercontinental or international connectivity, this cable enables inter-island communication across the archipelago, which is characteristic of the Maldives' dispersed geography and the infrastructure solutions developed to serve it.

Cables Landing at Fuvahmulah

The Dhiraagu Cable Network is the sole submarine cable landing at Fuvahmulah. The system spans 1,253 kilometres and reached ready-for-service status in 2012, with the cable listed as a draft system. All other endpoints on this cable are also located within the Maldives, confirming its role as a purely domestic network designed to connect the islands of the archipelago to one another rather than to foreign territories.

Regional Context

Among the 17 submarine cable landing points in the Maldives, Fuvahmulah hosts one cable, placing it in the top 59% of landing points by cable count. It sits well behind the leading hub of Hulhumale, which serves seven cables, and also behind Eydhafushi, Hithadhoo, and Kulhudhufushi, each of which host three cables. Fuvahmulah is comparable in scale to Dhangethi and Maafushi, both of which also serve two cables or fewer.

Network Role

Fuvahmulah functions as a single-cable terminus on the Dhiraagu Cable Network, a domestic system that forms part of the Maldives' inter-island submarine cable layer. Its connectivity is oriented entirely inward, linking this southern island to other points within the national network rather than to international destinations. The Dhiraagu Cable Network, at 1,253 kilometres, is considerably shorter than the Maldivian average cable length of 2,698 kilometres, reflecting its role as a regional intra-archipelago connector.

Within the Maldivian submarine cable graph, Fuvahmulah represents a single point of entry to the domestic network for a populated southern island. Its position on a purely internal cable underscores how the Maldives has built layered infrastructure to extend connectivity across its widely dispersed atolls, with some landing points serving as international gateways and others, like Fuvahmulah, serving as domestic endpoints within that broader system.