Matthew Town, Bahamas

Matthew Town, Bahamas: Submarine Cable Landing Point

Matthew Town is the chief settlement on Great Inagua Island, located in the far south of the Bahamas. Sitting at the southwestern corner of Great Inagua, it represents the southernmost extent of the Bahamian submarine cable network and serves as a landing point for one submarine cable connecting the Bahamas with neighboring Haiti. Its position in the southern Caribbean places it along a regional corridor that ties together island and mainland territories in the wider Caribbean basin.

A single submarine cable lands at Matthew Town: the Bahamas Domestic Submarine Network, known as BDSNi. This system links Matthew Town into a broader network of domestic and regional connectivity that spans multiple landing points across the Bahamian archipelago and extends to Haiti, making it part of both an intra-island and an inter-country connection.

Cables Landing at Matthew Town, Bahamas

The Bahamas Domestic Submarine Network (BDSNi) is the sole submarine cable landing at Matthew Town. With a total system length of 2,735 km, the cable reached ready-for-service status in 2006 and carries a draft status designation. In addition to Matthew Town, the BDSNi lands at multiple other points within the Bahamas and also connects to Haiti, enabling both domestic inter-island communication across the Bahamian archipelago and an international link to a neighboring Caribbean nation.

Regional Context

Within the Bahamas, Matthew Town is one of 21 submarine cable landing points across the country. Nassau leads the national network with three cables, while Cat Island, Eight-Mile Rock, Hawksbill, and Sandy Point each host two cables. Matthew Town and Alice Town each serve as single-cable landing points, placing Matthew Town among the less densely served but nonetheless connected nodes in the Bahamian submarine cable geography. Its ranking places it in the top 76 percent of Bahamian landing points by cable count.

Network Role

Matthew Town functions as a single-cable terminus rather than a multi-cable hub. Through the BDSNi, it sits at the southern end of a domestic Bahamian network that also reaches internationally to Haiti, enabling connectivity between Great Inagua Island and both other Bahamian islands and a neighboring country. The 2,735 km length of the BDSNi reflects the geographic challenge of knitting together the dispersed islands of the Bahamas and extending service to Haiti across a wide stretch of Caribbean waters.

In the broader regional submarine cable graph, Matthew Town's role as the BDSNi's southernmost Bahamian terminus demonstrates how even smaller or more remote settlements within an archipelagic nation are integrated into both domestic and international cable infrastructure, extending networked connectivity to a geographically isolated community at the far edge of the Bahamian island chain.