Hamnäs, Finland

Hamnäs: Submarine Cable Landing Point

Hamnäs is a coastal landing point in Finland, hosting three submarine cables that connect Finland to its immediate Baltic Sea neighbours. As a landing point, Hamnäs participates in both intercountry connections within the Baltic region, linking Finland to Sweden and Estonia. The combination of cables landing here positions Hamnäs as a node serving two distinct bilateral corridors simultaneously.

The three cables terminating at Hamnäs establish connections across the Gulf of Finland and the Baltic Sea. Two of these cables form a paired link between Finland and Estonia, while the third extends the reach of the landing point westward toward Sweden. Together, they represent connectivity that spans the immediate maritime geography of the northern Baltic.

Cables Landing at Hamnäs

STO-HEL-One is a submarine cable with a length of 560 km, reaching ready-for-service status in 2008. The cable connects Finland and Sweden, forming a cross-Baltic link between the two countries. Hamnäs serves as one of the Finnish endpoints of this system.

Finland Estonia Connection 1 (FEC-1) reached ready-for-service status in 2000. This cable connects Estonia and Finland across the Gulf of Finland. It represents one of the two parallel FEC systems that together form a reinforced bilateral link between the two countries on this route.

Finland Estonia Connection 2 (FEC-2) also reached ready-for-service status in 2000. Like FEC-1, this cable connects Estonia and Finland, and the two systems were brought into service in the same year. The presence of both FEC-1 and FEC-2 at Hamnäs means that the landing point carries a paired cable arrangement on the Finland–Estonia corridor.

Regional Context

Within Finland, Hamnäs ranks among the more modestly connected landing points, hosting three cables compared to Hanko with six, Helsinki with five, and Espoo with four. It shares a comparable cable count with Kotka and Lokalahti, both of which also host two cables, while Hamnäs exceeds Haradsholm, which hosts a single cable. Hamnäs therefore occupies a mid-tier position in Finland's overall submarine cable geography.

Network Role

Hamnäs enables two distinct bilateral corridors from Finnish territory: one toward Estonia across the Gulf of Finland, carried by the paired FEC-1 and FEC-2 systems, and one toward Sweden across the Baltic Sea via STO-HEL-One. The presence of two cables on the Estonia route provides a degree of route redundancy on that specific corridor, while the Swedish connection broadens the geographic reach of the landing point westward.

As a three-cable landing point, Hamnäs functions as a modest multi-cable hub rather than a single-cable terminus, contributing two distinct country-pair routes to Finland's national submarine cable graph and reinforcing Finland's direct maritime connections with both its southern and western Baltic neighbours.