Havelock, India

Havelock, India: Submarine Cable Landing Point

Havelock, officially known as Swaraj Dweep, is an island located in the Andaman Islands, part of the Indian union territory of Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Situated in Ritchie's Archipelago to the east of Great Andaman, the island lies approximately 41 kilometres northeast of Port Blair, the territorial capital. As an island territory geographically separated from the Indian mainland, Havelock depends on submarine cable infrastructure to maintain high-capacity digital connectivity with the rest of India.

One submarine cable lands at Havelock, connecting the island to the Indian mainland as part of a dedicated intra-country cable system. This cable establishes an inter-island corridor linking Havelock and the broader Andaman and Nicobar Islands chain to mainland India, enabling direct undersea communications capacity between the union territory and the rest of the country.

Cables Landing at Havelock, India

The Chennai–Andaman & Nicobar Islands Cable (CANI) is the sole submarine cable landing at Havelock. The cable spans approximately 2,300 kilometres and reached ready-for-service status in 2020. As its name indicates, CANI connects the Andaman and Nicobar Islands to Chennai on the southeastern coast of mainland India. All endpoints on this cable are located within India, making it an entirely domestic submarine cable system designed to serve the connectivity needs of India's island territories in the Bay of Bengal.

Regional Context

Within India's submarine cable network, which spans 21 cables across 26 landing points, Havelock hosts a single cable and ranks within the broader set of single-cable landing points in the country. It sits alongside Agatti, Amini, and Andrott as a one-cable terminus, while larger hubs such as Mumbai with 18 cables and Chennai with 9 cables serve as the country's primary international and domestic submarine cable centres. Kochi, with 2 cables, occupies a position between these two tiers.

Network Role

Havelock functions as a single-cable terminus on the CANI system, serving as one of the island endpoints that the cable was specifically designed to connect to the Indian mainland. The landing point enables direct undersea capacity between Havelock and Chennai, integrating this part of the Andaman Islands into India's domestic submarine cable infrastructure. Unlike multi-cable hubs such as Mumbai or Chennai, Havelock does not serve as a transit or branching node but rather as a dedicated endpoint for island connectivity.

In the broader regional submarine cable graph, Havelock's role reflects a pattern common to island territories worldwide, where a single purpose-built domestic cable provides the primary undersea link between an outlying island community and the national mainland network.