More than 95% of international internet traffic travels via submarine fibre-optic cables rather than satellites. UK subsea cable landings are the physical locations where international fibre-optic cables come ashore and connect into the UK's terrestrial telecom network. They are critical because almost all international internet traffic enters and leaves the UK through subsea cables, rather than satellites.
Cornwall - The southwest coast is one of the UK's most important transatlantic landing areas. This region hosts cables connecting the UK directly to North America, Ireland, and Continental Europe.
South Wales - South Wales has become increasingly important as a landing point for transatlantic and European connections. Some advantages of landing here include access to major fibre routes into London, lower infrastructure costs than the Southeast, and good power availability. Traffic from South Wales can quickly be backhauled into major UK network hubs.
Somerset and Devon - Several major cable systems make landfall along the southwest coast before connecting into national fibre backbones. These sites provide resilience by diversifying routes away from the busy southeast corner of England.
Kent and Essex - The east and southeast coasts serve as gateways to continental Europe. These routes typically connect to France, Belgium and the Netherlands, supporting very low latency links between Europe's major financial and cloud-computing hubs.
Modern subsea cables are increasingly designed around hyperscale cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud or Amazon Web Services. These all prefer landing points that can connect rapidly into major UK data-centre clusters. The most important destination remains the London and Thames Valley region, which hosts the UK's largest concentration of cloud and colocation infrastructure.
Future trends
Three big trends are shaping UK cable landings and increasing demand for high-capacity subsea routes.
1. AI traffic growth is driving huge increases in data and movement between Data centres and international networks
2. Operators want multiple geographically separated landing points and route diversity so that a cable cut, storm, or other disruption does not isolate the UK.
3. New technologies such as Hollow Core Fibre (HCF) can reduce propagation delay by around 30-35% versus conventional fibre.
