Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

A point: SG1. Z point: FR5. Term: 3 Years. Routing: Avoids Marseille and clocks 139 ms RTD. 

 Term: 1 Year. NRC: $10K. Delivery: 8 to 10 weeks. A pt: SG1. Z pt: LA1. Remark: No Bifrost provider currently offers 10G waves.

The EU has given tens of millions of Euros in preliminary development funds to kick start an Arctic cable that would bypass North America and connect Northern Europe to Japan. There have been ongoing efforts for over a decade to execute such a project, the most recent incarnation is Polar Connect. The idea is to create a new, highly diverse and ultra-low latency route linking Europe to Asia that bypasses the politically unstable Middle East and the less-than-friendly and lukewarm American ally. Although there could be some Russian harassment due to concerns about the cable serving as a surveillance tool via sensors attached it, the path looks downright idyllic in terms of the political environment relative to the Middle East. However, a glance at the map shows the immense challenge. One of the unwritten rules of cable deployment is to avoid shallow waters. Most recently built cables head immediately from their landing points to deep sea as quickly as possible. Ships infe...

There is one problem that no arctic cable advocate ever mentions, namely ice scouring. Neither NorduNet nor the Polar Connect team will ever mention this challenge. It is taboo. Here's the problem. Only 10% of an iceberg lies above sea's surface. Salt water is more dense than fresh water and fresh water ice. Hence icebergs are largely undersea and their tooth can extend as deep as 250 meters. In the shallow waters surrounding the Bering Strait the average depth is well under 60 meters. So the tooth or fang of a large iceberg can carve grooves in the sea bed ranging from 50 centimeters to 20 meters. While most ice gouges aare closer to 50 centimeters than 20 meters, deep groves have accumulated on the sea floor. Moreover, the measured depth is not necessarily the original depth of the groove due to sediment burial over time. An iceberg damaged the North Alaskan Quintillian cable in June 2023. It dug a groove 3 meters deep into the sea floor and severed the buried cable. The site...

The map shows the ultimate challenge for any cable crossing the North Pole. The Bering Strait is the exit for any polar project trying to reach Asia. But the average depth is only 30 to 50 meters. As you learned in school, the Bering Strait was a land bridge during the last Ice Age lasting from 37,500 to 12,000 years ago. The lower the temperature, the more water vapor is deposited as snow and ice on land. Hence the oceans recede as temperatures fall.  The construction rule of thumb is to bury a submarine cable when the sea is a thousand meters or less deep. This means a polar cable must be buried for over two thousand kilometers as the map shows. The North Alaskan coastal Quintillion cable's burial depth varies between two and four meters with a maximum of 12 meters. Deep burial is intended to protect the cable from icebergs scraping the sea floor in shallow water. A dual cable design raises per meter cost because the protect path would traverse the more shallow Russian side of t...

The illustration on top shows the Arctic cable's main predator: icebergs. In waters 500 meters or less deep, floating icebergs carve grooves in the seabed floor. These scars are typically one to two meters deep with the record being 15 meters. A fair number of grooves are carved 5 to 8.5 meters into the floor. Known as ice scouring, icebergs have left marks in water as deep as a thousand meters. These comments apply to both the North Pole and the Antarctic. Cables connecting either region to the rest of the world face this challenge. According to a US Government Geological survey, Canada's Beaufort Sea, highlighted in blue, has at least 2,200 ice scouring marks on its sea floor. Quintillion's cable extends into this region. Any cable linking Europe to Asia via the Arctic must go through the Bering Sea. Geological surveys have shown that ice scouring happens every year in the Bering Sea as wind and currents drive ice floes across waters as shallow as 20 meters. Although the ...