Little Saint James, Virgin Islands (U.S.)

Little Saint James, Virgin Islands (U.S.): Submarine Cable Landing Point

Little Saint James is a small island in the United States Virgin Islands, situated southeast of Saint Thomas. As a submarine cable landing point, it serves as a terminus for a short intra-territorial cable connection within the U.S. Virgin Islands. One submarine cable lands at Little Saint James, linking it by an underwater route to another location within the same island territory.

The single cable landing here, the Red Hook–Little Saint James system, is a very short connection of just 5 km, reflecting the island's proximity to neighboring infrastructure on Saint Thomas. The corridor enabled by this cable is entirely intra-territorial, connecting two points within the U.S. Virgin Islands rather than reaching across international boundaries or spanning intercontinental distances.

Cables Landing at Little Saint James, Virgin Islands (U.S.)

Red Hook–Little Saint James is a 5-kilometer submarine cable with a Ready for Service date listed as 2005, currently holding draft status. Both endpoints of this cable are located within the U.S. Virgin Islands, making it a short local link rather than an international or intercontinental system. The cable connects Little Saint James to Red Hook, a location on Saint Thomas, establishing a direct underwater data path between the small private island and the larger neighboring island's infrastructure.

Regional Context

Within the U.S. Virgin Islands, Little Saint James ranks among the smaller landing points by cable count, hosting one cable alongside peers such as Banana Bay, Brewer's Bay, Butler Bay, and Christiansted, each of which also hosts a single cable. By comparison, St. Croix leads the territory with five cables, and Great Bay hosts two, making Little Saint James one of several single-cable landing points that form the less densely connected tier of the territory's ten submarine cable landing points.

Network Role

Little Saint James functions as a single-cable terminus rather than a multi-cable hub. Its one connection, the Red Hook–Little Saint James cable, serves a purely local corridor, linking the island directly to Saint Thomas across a distance of just 5 kilometers. This positions the landing point as a terminal node rather than a transit or aggregation point within any broader regional or international submarine cable network.

Within the wider submarine cable graph of the U.S. Virgin Islands—a territory where the first cable arrived in 1997 and where an average cable length of around 2,659 km reflects the dominance of long-haul international systems—Little Saint James stands out as a distinctly local endpoint, illustrating how submarine cable infrastructure at even the smallest island scale can establish dedicated underwater connectivity between closely neighboring locations.