Defending The UK From Subsea Fibre Optic Cable Sabotage: Part 1

`This article reflects discussions I have had with war planners, government officials, policy analysts, and subsea cable colleagues. 

1. A striking fact is that there is no compelling evidence of subsea cable outages due to sabotage since the end of WWII. Subsea cables are poor terrorism targets. Terrorists create terror by killing and maiming people and damaging highly visible and important infrastructure like bridges, skyscrapers, prominent buildings or sites having symbolic importance. Intentional damage of a thin cable buried two meters deep in the English Channel does not have the shock value or cause sufficient disruption by itself to justify the great effort of clandestinely locating and severing it. Secondly, there are so many cables now that sabotage of one or two has little impact on voice or data traffic. RIPE analysis indicated that a country like Estonia experienced little layer 3 degradation despite losing subsea cables landing in the country or adjacent Finland, a regional telecom hub. The traffic was simply routed down the Baltic States to Warsaw and then onward to Frankfurt and Amsterdam. The ever growing web of subsea cables combined with many landline routes softens the impact of any single fault. In particular, the American Tech Giants are constantly developing new landing sites and subsea routes. Examples include the rise of France, Spain, and Portugal as landing spots on the European side as well as and also the rise of Virginia Beach and Myrtle Beach on the US side. Physical diversity and resiliency are rapidly improving. 

While the UK is an island as opposed to being part of a continent like Estonia, the former does have 52 subsea cables, many of which are very high capacity. There is nothing that prevents activating decommissioned cables. It would be particularly difficult to sabotage the English Channel cables due to British and French surveillance across the narrow straits separating the two countries. The same holds for the Irish Sea. These cables are buried making their destruction particularly challenging. However, cable landing stations are obvious targets with many of them serving several cables like the 4 CLS facilities in Bude which host 11 undersea networks. Cable landing station risk can be considerably reduced by making them just power feeds with virtually all network equipment dispersed among UK's many data centers. Ukraine has shown that it is possible in war time to quickly repair targeted energy infrastructure. Indeed, many cable landing stations today contain no submarine line termination equipment, just power infrastructure including the Anjana CLS in Northern Spain.