Banana Bay, Virgin Islands (U.S.)

Banana Bay, Virgin Islands (U.S.): Submarine Cable Landing Point

Banana Bay is a submarine cable landing point located in the United States Virgin Islands, a territory in the eastern Caribbean. As a coastal landing point in this island territory, Banana Bay serves as one of ten submarine cable landing points spread across the Virgin Islands (U.S.). One submarine cable lands at Banana Bay, connecting it to the broader intra-island submarine cable network of the U.S. Virgin Islands.

The single cable landing at Banana Bay, the St. Thomas-St. Croix System, establishes an inter-island connection entirely within the U.S. Virgin Islands. This places Banana Bay within a category of landing points that facilitate local island-to-island connectivity rather than intercontinental or international corridors. Its role in the territorial network reflects the geographic reality of an archipelago where submarine links serve as primary fixed connections between individual islands.

Cables Landing at Banana Bay

The St. Thomas-St. Croix System is the sole submarine cable landing at Banana Bay. Spanning 183 km, it reached its ready-for-service date in 1997 and currently holds draft status. Both endpoints of this cable are located within the U.S. Virgin Islands, making it a purely intra-territorial submarine link connecting the two main islands of St. Thomas and St. Croix. No additional technical specifications, such as capacity or fiber pair counts, have been recorded for this system.

Regional Context

Among the ten submarine cable landing points in the U.S. Virgin Islands, Banana Bay hosts a single cable, placing it alongside Brewer's Bay, Butler Bay, Christiansted, and Flamingo Bay, each of which also serves one cable. Great Bay accommodates two cables, while St. Croix, Virgin Islands leads the territory with five cables, making it the most connected landing point in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Banana Bay ranks within the top 80% of landing points in the territory by cable count, reflecting the broader pattern of distributed but modest connectivity across the island chain.

Network Role

Banana Bay functions as a single-cable terminus, serving the St. Thomas-St. Croix System and enabling direct submarine connectivity between two of the principal islands of the U.S. Virgin Islands. This inter-island link, established in 1997, represents one of the earliest submarine cable connections in the territory's network, which recorded its first cable RFS in that same year. Because both endpoints of the cable remain within the U.S. Virgin Islands, Banana Bay's role is specifically oriented toward intra-territorial rather than international data routing.

In the regional submarine cable graph of the U.S. Virgin Islands, Banana Bay occupies a position comparable to several other single-cable landing points distributed across the islands. Its presence alongside locations such as Brewer's Bay, Butler Bay, and Christiansted illustrates how the territory's submarine cable infrastructure is spread across multiple coastal sites, each contributing a segment of the overall inter-island network rather than concentrating connectivity at a single hub.