CELIA Cable Puts ABC Islands on a 170 Tbps Backbone
For operators sizing a Caribbean footprint, connectivity has always been the constraint. The CELIA (Caribbean Elite Alliance) submarine cable is on track to change that. 3,700 km, a minimum of eight fibre pairs, an initial design capacity above 170 Tbps, ready for service Q3 2027.
The design isn't incremental. It puts Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao on a direct backbone to Boca Raton, Florida and San Juan, Puerto Rico — with intermediate landings at Martinique, Antigua and Barbuda, and Saint Barthélemy. That reshapes what a Caribbean tenant strategy can look like.
Landing points and consortium
The cable lands at Baby Beach (Aruba) and Kralendijk (Bonaire). The consortium — Setar (Aruba), Orange, Telxius, and the Antigua Public Utilities Authority — was joined in 2025 by the Saba Statia Cable System (representing the Dutch government) for the Bonaire landing, and by Aquatel (Curaçao's state-owned telecom) for Curaçao integration.
The EU is co-funding via the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) Digital Fund for the CELIA-CETC sub-system that connects the French and Dutch Caribbean territories. Marine survey vessels have been active in the region through 2026.
What 170 Tbps unlocks
Today the ABC islands' inter-island and international bandwidth is a hard ceiling on how much infrastructure operators want to concentrate there. CELIA lifts the ceiling — new fibre pairs, new latency profiles, new redundancy against the existing cable systems.
For sovereign clouds, financial services, and regional CDN edge nodes, that changes the deployment math. For tenants that had ruled out the region on connectivity alone, it puts the ABC islands back on the shortlist.
Plan for RFS, not for lit day
RFS Q3 2027 sounds distant. In deployment terms, it isn't. Rack, cabling, and cage decisions being made now need to accommodate the cable's arrival — cross-connect capacity, POP peering, and lit-service pricing all shift once CELIA is operational.
The operators who benefit most will be the ones staging their Cx and deployment programmes to land alongside the cable, not chase it after the fact.
Where Integrator Services fits
Integrator Services delivers rack-and-stack, cage builds, and commissioning on both sides of the CELIA landing footprint — EMEA and the Dutch Caribbean. If you're planning capacity in Curaçao, Aruba, or Bonaire ahead of RFS Q3 2027, send us the scope and we'll come back the same week with a staffed plan.
Request a scope