The beach at Selkirk Point looks unremarkable from the coast road: a strip of grey sand, a chain-link fence, a low concrete building with no sign. Underneath it runs one of the busiest single points of internet infrastructure most people will never see.
Halcyon-4, the subsea cable that came ashore here this month, carries a fibre pair capable of moving 24 terabits of data per second between two continents, joining three older cables that already land within a few hundred metres of this stretch of coast. Together the four cables carry an estimated 70 percent of the region’s international internet traffic.
“People imagine the internet as something in the air,” said cable engineer Tobias Renn, who supervised the final shore-end splice. “It’s mostly wire. It comes out of the ocean right here, goes into that building, and from that building it goes everywhere.”
The landing process took eleven days. A cable ship anchored offshore fed the line through a buried conduit under the beach while divers guided it into the landing station’s cable vault. The final splice, joining the ocean segment to the station’s internal wiring, took engineers nine hours working in a clean room built specifically for the task.
“One bad splice and you’ve lost the whole project,” Renn said. “We don’t rush that part no matter how far behind schedule everything else runs.”
Selkirk Point’s concentration of cables is itself a subject of quiet concern among network planners. Halvorsen’s review of regional infrastructure filings found no publicly disclosed contingency plan for a scenario in which damage, whether from an anchor drag or a seismic event, affected the beach’s shared conduit route and cut multiple cables at once.
Station manager Perpetua Solano said redundancy exists at the network level, since traffic can reroute through other landing points elsewhere on the coast, even if the physical cables themselves are concentrated in one place.
“We know what a single point of failure means,” she said. “The industry has been aware of the Selkirk Point concentration for years. Diversifying the landing sites is the long-term answer, and it is also the much more expensive one.”
For now, Halcyon-4 joins the coastline’s other three cables under the same unmarked stretch of sand, its capacity already booked by data centre operators inland who will not say publicly how much of it their own traffic will use.
