Hoonah, AK, United States

Hoonah, AK: Submarine Cable Landing Point

Hoonah is a city on Chichagof Island in the Alaska Panhandle, situated approximately 48 kilometres west of Juneau across the Inside Passage in southeast Alaska. As the only first-class city on Chichagof Island, Hoonah serves as a landing point for submarine cable infrastructure connecting communities across this remote coastal region of the United States. One submarine cable is scheduled to land at Hoonah, extending connectivity to this largely Tlingit community of just under a thousand permanent residents.

The single cable landing at Hoonah operates entirely within the United States, linking Alaskan communities along a domestic corridor rather than providing intercontinental or transoceanic connectivity. This positions Hoonah as part of the intra-Alaskan submarine cable network, where underwater cable systems bridge island communities and coastal settlements that are otherwise separated by the complex waterways of the Inside Passage and surrounding Alaskan waters.

Cables Landing at Hoonah, AK

FISH South is a submarine cable with a total length of 900 kilometres, currently in draft status with a projected ready-for-service date of 2027. The cable connects landing points entirely within the United States, running between multiple domestic Alaskan endpoints. Hoonah represents one of the termination points on this system, which will bring direct submarine cable connectivity to Chichagof Island upon completion.

Regional Context

Within the broader United States submarine cable landscape, which encompasses 113 cables across 160 landing points, Hoonah ranks in the top 69 percent of American landing points by cable count. This places it well behind major multi-cable hubs such as Boca Raton, FL and San Juan, PR, each of which hosts eight cables, or Hermosa Beach, CA, Kapolei, HI, and Myrtle Beach, SC, which each host five. Hoonah is representative of the many single-cable landing points that, collectively, account for a significant share of the United States' distributed coastal cable infrastructure.

Network Role

Hoonah functions as a single-cable terminus rather than a multi-cable hub. The forthcoming FISH South system will establish a direct submarine link to other Alaskan communities, providing Chichagof Island with the kind of dedicated undersea connectivity that aerial or terrestrial routes cannot easily replicate across the inland waterways of the Alaska Panhandle. The 900-kilometre system is sized for regional Alaskan service, not long-haul international traffic.

Within the regional submarine cable graph, Hoonah represents a node where domestic Alaskan connectivity is extended to an island community separated by the Inside Passage. Its inclusion in the FISH South system reflects the broader pattern of deploying submarine cables to serve geographically isolated Alaskan settlements that lie beyond practical reach of land-based network infrastructure.