The Quintillion Arctic Cable: Implications For Europe's Polar Connect Project

The three fibre pair Quintillion cable went live in 2017. Its current throughput is 10 Tbps per fibre pair. It includes terrestrial back haul from Prudhoe Bay down to Fairbank, Alaska, in the middle of the state. The cable was deeply buried with an average depth of 3.7 meters with bore pipes used to bring the fibre pair ashore to the manhole. Each landing threads the fibre optic cable through steel conduit at least 18 meters under the sea floor up to 1.6 kilometers offshore. This was accomplished via horizontal directional drilling. Project cost was around $150 million.

The cable is a godsend for these Alaskan communities and was built to top notch engineering standards. But it still suffers from ice scouring incidents where icebergs cut through the sea floor and have severed or severely damaged the cable. A major outage occurs roughly once a year, but the real problem is the repair time. It is simply not economical for a subsea cable to own an icebreaker or to risk a cable ship's safety by deploying it in ice laden waters. So in most cases the Quintillion must wait for the ice to dissipate to send a cable ship to the area. The latest outage started January 18 due to ice scouring about 38 miles off shore. According to Quintillion, hazardous ice makes it impossible to repair the cable until August or September of this years. So the outage will be at least eight to possibly nine months.

So the implication for Polar Connect is pretty clear. Any cable from Japan to Europe could be down 25% to 75% of the time depending on the availability of icebreakers. Its sheer length guarantees it. Yes, a dedicated ice breaker could lead to much better up time, but it is a big operating cost and would probably render any cable uneconomical. I challenge Nordunet to inject some realism into their thinking because right now it sounds like just hand waving. It is the dream of Quintillion's management to build a Japan/Europe cable. But they have not been able to raise the money and I doubt Nordunet will do any better. Several groups have all been aiming to achieve the same thing, namely link Japan to Europe via the Arctic. No success so far. Its time for the EU to cut its losses. 

Map Of The Fibre Optic Subsea Quintillion Cable



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