The coastal point where a submarine cable meets the terrestrial network, a scarce and locatable link on which an entire country's connectivity can depend.
A cable landing station is the coastal building where a submarine cable is joined to the terrestrial network, powered and where its signal is regenerated. It is a scarce link, a country often having only a handful and an island sometimes only one, and its location is public because it appears in maritime permitting records. Risk concentrates there twice over: through the vulnerability of the site itself, whether fire, flooding, power loss or sabotage, and through the fragility of the cable over its final kilometers, where shallow water exposes it to the anchors and trawls that cause most recorded breaks. Repair depends on a very small global fleet of cable ships, whose chartering and work permits stretch the outage far beyond the technical time needed for a splice. A landing station is thus the classic case of a low insured-value asset whose unavailability produces business interruption losses out of all proportion to its replacement cost.
On 15 January 2022, the Hunga Tonga volcanic eruption severed the only international submarine cable serving Tonga. The country was cut off from international connectivity for roughly five weeks, with service restored only on 22 February 2022.
cable landing station, station d'atterrissement, point d'atterrage