Chile's Proposed Antarctic Fibre Optic Subsea Cable

Chile's government is investigating the idea of linking Chile to Antarctica via a subsea cable. This is part of a larger initiative to make Chile a major telecom and data center hub. Its government is partnering with Google on the Humboldt cable that will connect Australia to Chile with branching units to important Pacific island chains like French Polynesia and Fiji. Pioneer Consulting, a very well known and respected subsea cable design company based in New Jersey, will do the feasibility study. Antarctica has a number of research stations including America's National Science Foundation's McMurdo facility. Web cam photo of the station below as of 11:30 AM CET. Here is a link to a relevant article.

These research sites definitely need more bandwidth than they currently get via geostationary satellite providers and Starlink's LEO service. Not clear if they are willing to pay enough to justify building the proposed Antarctic cable. A big concern is ice scouring. This is where icebergs scrape the bottom of the continental shelf plowing the ocean floor and potentially destroying any cables buried there. It is not just an academic possibility. Ice scouring severed Quintillion's Alaska cable in 2023 and again on January 24, 2025. Repairs are not routine. The expected time to repair the latest damage is September of 2025. Average mean time to repair is six to nine months. I suspect it is simply too expensive to hire an icebreaker during the extreme winter conditions. A good maintenance contract for the Chile-to-Antarctica cable would be very expensive as the likelihood of ice scouring is high along the Antarctica continental shelf and McMurdo is a long way from any major South American port.

Consequently, I overflow with skepticism about these projects because cable construction would be very expensive with very deep burial required in Antarctica's coastal waters. Furthermore, outages would be frequent and long lasting and clients are not typically charged for service during force majeure outages. I doubt there exist price points that generate enough customer interest to lease capacity and yet generate enough revenue to justify the project even if Chile's government provides grants. I think what is likely to happen is that these research stations will use Amazon's 1 gig LEO service when it becomes available in the near future. There will be soon high capacity LEO service available as opposed to Starlink's current scrawny offerings.

Webcam Photo of McMurdo Station in Antarctica


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