Guam Okinawa Kyushu Incheon (GOKI)

Overview

The Guam Okinawa Kyushu Incheon (GOKI) cable is a regional submarine cable system connecting Guam and Japan. Despite its name referencing Incheon and Okinawa, the system lands at three points across these two territories, serving the western Pacific corridor between Guam and the Japanese archipelago. The cable spans a total length of 4,244 km.

Route and Landings

In Guam, the cable lands at Tumon Bay. In Japan, it comes ashore at two locations: Kitakyushu, on the northern tip of Kyushu island, and Naha, the capital of Okinawa Prefecture. These three landing points establish connectivity across the western Pacific island chain between Guam and the Japanese mainland.

Ownership and Operators

GOKI is owned solely by AT&T, the American telecommunications company. AT&T has maintained a long-standing presence in transoceanic cable infrastructure across the Pacific region.

Technical Profile

The GOKI cable stretches 4,244 km, placing it among the shorter systems operating in the Guam–Japan corridor relative to the broader range of cables in the region.

Status and Timeline

GOKI entered service in 2013 and has been operational for approximately 13 years. The cable currently connects Guam and Japan and continues to serve traffic across this segment of the western Pacific.

Regional Context

Guam hosts 17 submarine cables landing across 5 landing points, while Japan is served by 38 cables spanning 46 landing points, reflecting the high density of international connectivity in both locations. Within this corridor, GOKI is shorter than the majority of peer systems—it is longer than approximately 33% of the 45 other cables touching the same countries. Regional peers include the Asia-America Gateway (AAG) Cable System and EAC-C2C, both substantially longer trans-Pacific systems, as well as newer cables such as Bifrost and Bulikula, which are planned or under construction and will add further capacity to the Guam corridor in the coming years.

Performance measurements over the past 60 days, drawn from 97 ping tests routed through GOKI, show an average round-trip latency of 78.7 ms, with a best recorded latency of 49.1 ms. These figures are consistent with a cable of this length operating across a mid-Pacific segment.

Strategic Role

GOKI provides direct submarine connectivity between Guam and two distinct points in Japan—one in Okinawa and one on Kyushu—allowing traffic to reach both the southern Japanese islands and the Kyushu mainland via a single cable system. As a comparatively compact system in a corridor dominated by long-haul transoceanic cables, GOKI serves a more focused intra-regional function, linking a key Pacific hub in Guam with two geographically separated Japanese landing sites.