The Polar Connect Project: Europe To Japan Cable Via The North Pole

This project excites many powerful groups in Europe. Scientists want to equip the cable with sensors to study the Arctic Ocean while the EU wants to strengthen its influence on the Far North and also create a unique, low latency communication link with Asia that bypasses North America. It is in large part about infrastructure sovereignty. The benefits are quite clear. Indeed, they are at first glance compelling. Right now the EU has given a few million Euros to a consortium of carriers and educational networks to design it and perhaps conduct the geophysical survey.

Unfortunately, the reality is more complicated. Indeed, the project has two Achilles Heels. A single cable is likely to be down a good deal of the time. That is the track record of Arctic cables: outages take in many cases 4 to 9 months to fix. So it is necessary to build a ring, which means two diverse subsea cables. So the total project cost doubles.

But that is just the beginning of the challenge. Most cable ships cannot break ice. So the project will need one to two icebreakers to accompany a cable ship to do the geophysical survey. But for repair and upgrades the project will require someone like Orange Marine to retrofit a cable ship or build a new one designed to handle the harsh Arctic environment. The annual maintenance costs of at least one Arctic suitable cable ship and a icebreaker will be very high. When I joined Hibernia Atlantic in 2005, total maintenance for two Atlantic cables and one Irish Sea cable was $11 million per year. That's equivalent to $18 million in 2025 dollars. So I expect the annual maintenance costs for Polar Connect to be 2x to 3x that figure or from $36 million or $54 million per year. So over a 20 year life span total maintenance costs could be as much as a billion dollars.

The estimated construction cost of these two cables is likely to be one to two billion dollars. A half billion per cable is miraculously low. So this is a huge undertaking. But the two cables are likely to be down 25% to 50% of the time. This is no exaggeration. A floating iceberg will scrape the bottom of the sea lying on the continental shelf. This is known as ice scouring. In a recent incident the North Alaskan shore Quintillion cable suffered an ice scouring outage that lasted 7 months: https://lnkd.in/gg8TXE6G. Because Polar Connect would traverse the Bering Strait, it's pretty much impossible to avoid ice scouring outages. Quintillion has suffered repeated outages despite burying its cable three meters deep offshore together with bore pipe landings. The company's original purpose was to connect Japan to Europe, but it has been unable to raise the funds although it has been trying since 2017. The capital cost of Polar Connect is way beyond what the EU will provide. The EU functions like an angel investor. So Polar Connect must face the commercial reality of investor skepticism in order to turn its dream into reality. The backers of Polar Connect have been trying for a decade to raise the requisite funding and they have failed. There is no major carrier or American Tech Giant that will be the lead investor on this project.