The Wires Beneath the Water: Understanding Caribbean Telecommunications Infrastructure

The internet feels invisible. The infrastructure that carries it is anything but. A closer look at the cables, operators, data centres, and exchange points that keep the Caribbean connected — and the gaps that still put that connectivity at risk.

 Every time a business in Port of Spain sends an invoice, a government official in Bridgetown joins a video call, or a student in Kingston submits an assignment, that action travels through physical infrastructure — cable, fibre, antenna, router, data centre — before it reaches its destination. That infrastructure is largely invisible in daily life. It becomes visible only when it fails.

Understanding telecommunications infrastructure is not a technical exercise for engineers. It is a strategic literacy requirement for every executive, policymaker, and board member making decisions about digital transformation in the Caribbean. The quality, diversity, and resilience of a country’s telecommunications infrastructure determines what digital services are possible, at what cost, and with what level of reliability. It shapes the competitiveness of every business that depends on connectivity — which, in 2026, is every business.

This article maps that infrastructure across three levels: the local and national networks that carry traffic within countries, the regional and international submarine cables that connect us to each other and to the world, and the data centres and Internet Exchange Points that determine where content lives and how efficiently it is delivered.

The Local Layer: Mobile, Fixed, and the Fight for the Last Mile

The Caribbean telecommunications market reached approximately $6.5 billion in 2025, supported by over 22 million active mobile subscribers across the region. Mobile penetration exceeds 100% in several markets, including Trinidad and Tobago at 155%, Jamaica at 104%, and Barbados at 115%, reflecting the prevalence of multiple-SIM usage and mobile-first digital behaviour.

In Trinidad and Tobago, the market is shaped by two dominant mobile operators. TSTT — the incumbent, jointly owned by the Government of T&T through National Enterprises Limited (51%) and Cable & Wireless Communications (49%) — operates its mobile services under the bmobile brand and its fixed broadband services under the blink brand. TSTT has invested significantly in WTTX, its fixed wireless network, which is 5G-ready, while also maintaining a national fibre network and legacy copper infrastructure. Digicel, the Jamaica-headquartered pan-Caribbean operator, competes directly across mobile and increasingly in enterprise services, having undergone debt restructuring in 2024 when a group of US private equity firms took over control of the company. Liberty Caribbean — operating the Flow brand in T&T and across 18 Caribbean markets — provides fixed broadband, cable television, and enterprise connectivity.

The fixed broadband picture tells a more complex story than mobile penetration rates suggest. Internet penetration varies widely across the region: Barbados and the Bahamas lead at 82–85%, Jamaica at 68%, Trinidad at 77%, and Haiti trails at just 37%. Fixed broadband penetration averages 18% regionally, with mobile data being the primary access method for most Caribbean citizens.

This mobile-first reality has important implications. Mobile broadband is adequate for many consumer applications but provides less consistent performance for the bandwidth-intensive workloads that enterprise digital transformation requires — video conferencing, cloud application access, large data transfers, real-time analytics. The Caribbean’s digital economy ambitions require both strong mobile infrastructure and deeper fixed broadband penetration, particularly in business districts and industrial areas.

The 5G transition is underway but uneven. 5G connections accounted for 6% of total mobile connections in the Caribbean in mid-2025 and are expected to surpass 20% by 2030, according to GSMA figures. Flow/Liberty Latin America launched 5G services in select areas of Jamaica and Trinidad in 2024, while Digicel is conducting 5G trials across multiple markets, with full regional 5G coverage projected by 2028–2030.

5G matters for enterprise connectivity not because of raw speed — 4G LTE is already sufficient for most enterprise applications — but because of the low-latency, high-density connection capabilities that enable Internet of Things deployments, smart manufacturing, remote monitoring of industrial assets, and AI-powered edge computing. For T&T’s energy sector, where remote monitoring of upstream assets and real-time operational data are critical, 5G’s industrial applications are the most commercially significant aspect of the technology.

The Submarine Cable Layer: The Physical Backbone of Caribbean Connectivity

The internet feels weightless. The infrastructure that carries it is emphatically not. Over 98% of global internet traffic is transmitted through a network of over 400 submarine cable systems collectively stretching 1.2 million kilometres across the ocean floor. The Caribbean’s digital economy is dependent on a subset of those cables — and the quality, age, diversity, and resilience of those cables directly determines the cost and quality of connectivity available to businesses and citizens in the region.

“The Caribbean has historically been served by ageing cables priced for oligopolistic markets. The new wave of investment between 2024 and 2027 represents a genuine opportunity to break that structural pattern — but only if the regulatory frameworks enable it.”

For Trinidad and Tobago, the submarine cable picture improved materially in 2024 with the activation of Digicel’s Deep Blue One system. Activated in June 2024, Deep Blue One is a 2,250 km subsea fibre cable connecting Chaguaramas and Rockly Bay, Trinidad & Tobago, with landing points in Georgetown, Guyana; Paramaribo, Suriname; and Cayenne, French Guiana. The cable has two to eight fibre pairs in each of its five branching units, offering a minimum capacity of 12 Tbps per fibre pair.

Critically, Deep Blue One was designed to interconnect with Orange’s Kanawa subsea cable running between French Guiana and Martinique, as well as Digicel’s existing Southern Caribbean Fiber system connecting Caribbean islands between Trinidad & Tobago and Puerto Rico, with onward connectivity to Miami and New York. This integration creates a more resilient multi-path architecture for T&T’s international connectivity — reducing single-point-of-failure risk and providing competitive alternative routing.

The offshore connectivity angle of Deep Blue One deserves specific attention. The cable was routed to enable connectivity to offshore oil and gas rigs, supporting the growing energy sector in the region. For a country whose energy sector is the primary driver of government revenue and foreign exchange, reliable, high-capacity connectivity to offshore platforms is not a convenience. It is an operational requirement for modern energy extraction and monitoring.

 Deep Blue One (Live – June 2024): 2,250 km | Digicel + Orange | Landing: T&T (Chaguaramas & Rockly Bay), Guyana, Suriname, French Guiana | 12 Tbps per fibre pair | Connects to SCF system (T&T–Puerto Rico–Miami)

CELIA – Caribbean ELIte Alliance (Expected Q3 2027): 3,700 km | SETAR, Orange, Telxius, APUA | Landing: Aruba, Martinique, Antigua, Puerto Rico, Boca Raton FL | 170+ Tbps capacity | Alcatel Submarine Networks as supplier

TAM-1 – Trans Americas Fiber (Expected late 2025): 7,000 km | Trans Americas Fiber System + Equinix MI1 Miami | 648 Tbps design capacity | Future phases to Bahamas and Eastern Caribbean

Maya-1.2 / Manta (Under development): Liberty Networks restructuring of Maya-1 system | New Manta cable also in development | Cayman Islands new cable legislation passed 2024

Southern Caribbean Fiber (SCF / Deep Blue): ~3,000 km | Digicel subsidiary | 20 islands Eastern Caribbean | T&T to Puerto Rico | Now rebranded as part of Deep Blue system

The broader Caribbean cable landscape is in the most active period of investment it has seen in decades. Investment in new subsea cable projects is expected to reach approximately $13 billion between 2025 and 2027 — nearly double the amount invested between 2022 and 2024 — driven by AI infrastructure demands and hyperscaler expansion by Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft.

However, new cables create new capacity but not automatically affordable competitive connectivity. The Caribbean has historically been served by cables that were ageing, consortium-owned, and priced for oligopolistic markets rather than competitive ones. The new cables entering service between 2024 and 2027 represent an opportunity to break that structural pattern — but only if landing rights, pricing structures, and wholesale access frameworks enable genuine competitive dynamics rather than simply creating new monopolies on new infrastructure.

Data Centres: Where the Digital Economy Actually Lives

A submarine cable is only as useful as the infrastructure at its landing point. Traffic arriving at a Caribbean cable landing station needs somewhere to go — and increasingly, that somewhere is a data centre capable of hosting the cloud services, content caches, and enterprise applications that regional organisations depend on.

The Caribbean data centre market is developing, but it remains underpowered relative to the region’s digital ambitions. Most Caribbean countries lack the neutral carrier data centre infrastructure that exists in mature markets — facilities with diverse power feeds, multiple cable connectivity options, carrier-neutral colocation space, and the density of connected networks needed to support low-latency content delivery.

The government data centre initiative in Trinidad and Tobago, supported by the €3 million EU-CAF grant signed in February 2025, specifically targets a Tier-4 government data centre — the highest available resilience standard — to host sensitive government digital infrastructure. A Tier-4 facility provides simultaneous maintainability: all components are redundant, and no single maintenance activity or equipment failure can cause downtime. For a government data centre hosting national digital identity infrastructure, real-time payment systems, and citizen service platforms, that resilience standard is the appropriate one.

But government data centres serve government workloads. The Caribbean’s private sector — banks, insurers, energy companies, retailers, telecommunications providers — requires carrier-neutral commercial data centre space where they can colocate equipment, connect to multiple carriers, and access the cloud on-ramps that hyperscalers like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure provide through partnerships with data centre operators.

At present, most Caribbean organisations with serious data centre requirements are routing their traffic to Miami — the dominant connectivity hub for the Americas — adding latency, adding cost, and creating the data jurisdiction challenges that make genuine data sovereignty policy difficult to implement. Building commercially viable, carrier-neutral data centres in Port of Spain, Kingston, and Bridgetown that are directly connected to the submarine cable systems landing in those markets would materially change the economics and architecture of Caribbean enterprise connectivity.

The IXP Layer: Keeping Local Traffic Local

The most underappreciated element of Caribbean telecommunications infrastructure is the Internet Exchange Point — the facility where Internet Service Providers interconnect directly, routing traffic between their customers without sending it offshore.

Trinidad and Tobago established its Internet Exchange Point, TTIX, with seven founding members: TSTT, Flow (Columbus Communications), Digicel, Massy Communications, Open Telecom, Greendot, and Lisa Communications. TTIX is physically located at the Fujitsu data centre in Barataria and gives ISPs a cost-effective way to connect their customers to locally destined content and services.

The economic logic of IXPs is simple but significant. Without a local exchange point, traffic between two T&T-based users on different networks typically travels to Miami and back before arriving at its destination. That round trip adds latency, costs money in international transit fees, and creates unnecessary dependency on international cable capacity. An IXP keeps local traffic local, improving performance, reducing cost, and strengthening network resilience.

Content provider presence is the downstream benefit that makes IXPs strategically valuable beyond simple traffic efficiency. When a major Content Delivery Network like Akamai or a streaming platform like Netflix places servers inside a local IXP or a directly connected data centre, that content is served from within the country rather than from Miami or Virginia. For end users this means dramatically lower latency and higher-quality streaming. For the country’s internet infrastructure, it means that a significant portion of bandwidth-intensive traffic never touches expensive international submarine cable capacity at all.

T&T became the ninth Caribbean territory to launch an IXP at the time of TTIX’s establishment, joining the British Virgin Islands, Curaçao, Dominica, Grenada, Haiti, St Maarten, St Lucia, and the Dominican Republic. Barbados, Belize, Jamaica, St Kitts and Nevis, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines have since developed their own IXP infrastructure, expanding the regional exchange point ecosystem.

The Strategic Gaps That Still Demand Attention

Three structural vulnerabilities in Caribbean telecommunications infrastructure deserve specific attention from both operators and policymakers in 2026.

Single-path dependency remains a systemic risk — Despite the new cables entering service, many Caribbean territories still depend on a small number of cable systems for all of their international connectivity. When a cable is damaged — by anchors, fishing gear, seismic activity, or deliberate interference — entire territories can be isolated or severely constrained. Resilience requires not just multiple cable systems but multiple cable landing stations, multiple terrestrial backhaul routes, and credible satellite backup — including the LEO satellite systems that are proving their value across the region.

Wholesale pricing structures limit competition — New submarine cables create new capacity, but capacity alone does not produce affordable, competitive connectivity unless the wholesale access framework enables multiple ISPs to purchase capacity at rates that allow them to compete with the cable owner’s own retail services. Regulatory frameworks for submarine cable access, open access to cable landing stations, and wholesale pricing transparency are as important to the connectivity agenda as the physical infrastructure investment itself. TATT’s role in shaping that framework in T&T is as consequential as any single infrastructure project.

The data centre gap constrains cloud adoption — Caribbean organisations that want to use cloud services at enterprise scale face a connectivity tax that their North American and European competitors do not. Routing cloud traffic through Miami adds latency and cost, and forces data residency decisions that compromise both performance and sovereignty. Building carrier-neutral data centre capacity in key Caribbean hubs — connected directly to the landing infrastructure of the new submarine cable systems — is the missing link between the cable investment wave and the enterprise digital transformation it is supposed to enable.

 The telecommunications infrastructure of the Caribbean is in its most active period of investment and renewal in a generation. The Deep Blue One activation, the CELIA announcement, the TAM-1 build, Liberty’s Maya-1.2 restructuring, the 5G rollouts in T&T and Jamaica, the government Tier-4 data centre initiative — taken together, these represent a genuine infrastructure step-change.

But infrastructure is an enabling condition, not a guarantee of outcomes. The value of a submarine cable is realised in the pricing structure that governs who can access it and at what cost. The value of a 5G network is realised in the enterprise applications that run over it. The value of a data centre is realised in the cloud services and content delivery networks that colocate within it. And the value of an Internet Exchange Point is realised in the traffic that actually flows through it — and in the content providers who decide that the Caribbean is worth a local point of presence.

The infrastructure investment is happening. The policy, commercial, and governance work that translates that investment into genuine digital competitiveness is the harder task — and it is still in progress.