The government is “very close” to announcing the winning bidder who will be contracted to construct and operate the Cayman Islands’ new submarine cable, planning minister Jay Ebanks has said.
Speaking on Radio Cayman’s ‘For the Record’ on 28 August, Ebanks said the procurement process, run through the government’s Bonfire portal, is nearing its end.
The aim of the project is to add a new international fibre-optic connection to Grand Cayman, with an option for a Cayman Brac link, reducing reliance on the ageing Maya-1 and Cayman-Jamaica Fiber System cables.
The government opened bidding for the current phase of the project in February.
“The investment is intended to enhance redundancy, improve resilience against outages, and support the continued growth of the Islands’ digital economy and critical national services,” it said at the time.
The government has said it does not intend to enter the telecoms market itself, but to partner a wholesale operator, offering a one-time grant subsidy.
The most recent budget set aside CI$1 million each for 2026 and 2027 for a third-party operator to “build, own, operate and collect revenue” from the cable in return for a grant.
The Submarine Cable (Telecommunications Resilience) Act, 2025, passed in December in parliament, set out the framework for the project to advance.
The act empowers the government to contract a “commercial partner” to construct and operate the new cable connection.
While Ebanks described the process as four years in the making, referencing work initiated during his tenure in the PACT government, the need for a new submarine cable has been under discussion for many years.
An announcement in 2017 to connect Cayman to the Deep Blue Cable, a pan-Caribbean subsea network reaching Colombia and Panama, did not materialise.
Since 2020, at least five tenders relating to the subsea cable project have been posted on the government’s Bonfire portal, beginning with a request for information that year to open industry consultation and a tender in 2021 for a feasibility study.
The government hired Grant Thornton in 2022 to prepare an outline business case, which was released in 2024 and identified the construction of a third cable as a national security priority.
The most recent tender, a ‘notice of opportunity’ that opened on 9 February, sought parties able to build and operate the cable for about 25 years.
At the launch of the notice, Ebanks called it “a decisive step towards securing our digital future”.
