Polar Connect Project Update - Talk About Town

I attended both SubOptic 2025 and a subsequent Carrier Community subsea cable event this week. This long shot dream came up in conversations. This 12 fibre pair project to connect Japan to Europe via the North Pole has formed a consortium together with a memorandum of understanding, but it has not secured financing or an anchor tenant. This is not surprising. Nordunet is the project's champion; it is a collaboration of the five national research and education networks of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Greenland, and Finland. The cable project is confusing because the vision is to have two cables, one using the shortest path possible, which is via the North Pole, and another cable for resiliency that snakes through the Northwest passage and closely follows the Canadian shore.

Some sources estimate that the Northwest passage cable would cost $1.1 billion. Obviously maintenance fees would be enormous. Today there is no cable ship designed for the North Pole. The survey alone would require at least one icebreaker plus a cable ship similar to those serving the Northern Norwegian islands. More likely, it would take two icebreakers. Assuming such a cable can be deployed, it would face danger from iceberg scouring close to shore. Icebergs are mostly submerged. So they scrape the bottom of the continental shelf and can easily rip up a buried cable. This recently happened to the Quintillion cable that serves Northern Alaska. The repair took six months. 

So we are looking at probably $2.5 billion dollars to build a subsea cable ring as well as $125 million in annual maintenance charges. Not to mention a lot of down time plus as much as several months to repair a single fault depending No hyperscaler is going to become an anchor tenant for this project. It would be the first of its kind, but more importantly it poses exceptional technical challenges both in terms of deployment and repair. The twin themes driving the project include data sovereignty, which really means it avoids the United States, and lower latency between Europe and Asia. 

The EU is providing seed money to do spadework on the project. But the vast bulk of the $2.5 billion must be private sector money. I don't see venture capitalists or pension funds taking this risk. The real puzzle for me is who is advising the EU on this project. It is extremely risky. I wonder if the senior EU politicians supporting it have any idea of what they are supporting or the risks involved. My guess is that they have no clue. But supporting has little political cost since the private sector must provide 98% of the project's financing. So it is easy choice for a politician to support as Nordunet calls it, "a visionary project".