Little Andaman, India

Little Andaman, India: Submarine Cable Landing Point

Little Andaman is an island located at the southern end of the Andaman archipelago, part of the Indian union territory of Andaman and Nicobar Islands, lying approximately 88 kilometres south of Port Blair. As the fourth largest of the Andaman Islands, it sits at a geographic remove from the Indian mainland, making submarine cable connectivity a significant means of linking the island to national telecommunications infrastructure. One submarine cable lands at Little Andaman, connecting it directly to the Indian mainland and forming part of a domestic intra-national corridor.

The single cable serving Little Andaman is the Chennai-Andaman & Nicobar Islands Cable (CANI), a system designed specifically to serve the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Rather than connecting India to foreign territories, CANI operates as a domestic system, with all endpoints located within India. This makes Little Andaman a node on an inter-island and island-to-mainland corridor rather than part of an intercontinental route.

Cables Landing at Little Andaman

The Chennai-Andaman & Nicobar Islands Cable (CANI) is a 2,300-kilometre submarine cable system that reached ready-for-service status in 2020. As its name indicates, the cable runs between Chennai, on India's southeastern mainland coast, and multiple landing points across the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. All countries served by this cable are within India, confirming its role as a purely domestic connectivity system. Little Andaman represents one of the southern-most landing points on this system, extending the cable's reach to the lower portion of the Andaman archipelago.

Regional Context

Within India's submarine cable landscape, Little Andaman hosts a single cable, placing it alongside similarly positioned landing points such as Agatti, Amini, and Andrott, each of which also serves a single cable. This contrasts sharply with major Indian cable hubs such as Mumbai, which hosts 18 cables, and Chennai, which hosts 9. Little Andaman's single-cable status reflects its role as a remote island terminus rather than a gateway hub, consistent with the nature of island connectivity infrastructure across India's 26 cable landing points.

Network Role

Little Andaman functions as a single-cable terminus on a domestic submarine cable system, receiving connectivity routed from the Indian mainland via the CANI system. Its network role is narrowly defined: it extends mainland Indian telecommunications reach to the southern Andaman Islands, serving a geographically isolated community that lacks alternative land-based connections. The CANI cable, at 2,300 kilometres, is considerably shorter than India's average submarine cable length of approximately 8,059 kilometres, reflecting its regional rather than intercontinental purpose.

In the broader submarine cable graph of India, Little Andaman represents the extension of a spoke-and-hub domestic model, where a mainland city such as Chennai anchors connectivity outward to island territories. Its presence in the network illustrates how submarine cable infrastructure serves not only international data exchange but also the internal territorial integration of island regions with their mainland counterparts.