Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

The map shows the ultimate challenge for any cable crossing the North Pole. The Bering Strait is the exit for any polar project trying to reach Asia. But the average depth is only 30 to 50 meters. As you learned in school, the Bering Strait was a land bridge during the last Ice Age lasting from 37,500 to 12,000 years ago. The lower the temperature, the more water vapor is deposited as snow and ice on land. Hence the oceans recede as temperatures fall.  The construction rule of thumb is to bury a submarine cable when the sea is a thousand meters or less deep. This means a polar cable must be buried for over two thousand kilometers as the map shows. The North Alaskan coastal Quintillion cable's burial depth varies between two and four meters with a maximum of 12 meters. Deep burial is intended to protect the cable from icebergs scraping the sea floor in shallow water. A dual cable design raises per meter cost because the protect path would traverse the more shallow Russian side of t...

The illustration on top shows the Arctic cable's main predator: icebergs. In waters 500 meters or less deep, floating icebergs carve grooves in the seabed floor. These scars are typically one to two meters deep with the record being 15 meters. A fair number of grooves are carved 5 to 8.5 meters into the floor. Known as ice scouring, icebergs have left marks in water as deep as a thousand meters. These comments apply to both the North Pole and the Antarctic. Cables connecting either region to the rest of the world face this challenge. According to a US Government Geological survey, Canada's Beaufort Sea, highlighted in blue, has at least 2,200 ice scouring marks on its sea floor. Quintillion's cable extends into this region. Any cable linking Europe to Asia via the Arctic must go through the Bering Sea. Geological surveys have shown that ice scouring happens every year in the Bering Sea as wind and currents drive ice floes across waters as shallow as 20 meters. Although the ...

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...

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 ...

The EU recently gave 6 million Euros to the Northern European Polar Connect Initiative which aims to build a subsea cable connecting Japan to Europe via the Far North. See the map below for routing. NorduNet is a network linking universities and research organizations in the five Nordic countries of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Sweden, and Norway. It is taking the lead on this project which is looking at two alternatives routes to reach Asia. One route would be via the North Pole and the other via the Northwest Passage. This would give Europe access to Asia without traversing the US or Canada and hence offer better privacy and more secure communication as well much lower latency. Because the proposed paths are highly diverse to the usual suspects of Atlantic cables landing in Canada or the US, they might be attractive for resiliency purposes. One can imagine carriers splitting their traffic between the Polar routes and the more traditional cross-US routes for Pacific/European traffic. C...

EU Gives Old Boys Club European Consortium 6 Billion Euros for LEO Every major world power bloc wants its own LEO satellite constellation. The EU is no exception. It has agreed to give a European consortium consisting of SES, Eutelsat, and Hipasat, 6 billion Euros to develop and deploy by 2030 a total of 290 LEO and MEO satellites. Obviously the EU wants the security and privacy of a homegrown communication system to be called IRIS that could back up terrestrial and subsea cables. I understand the impulse. The Europeans face an aggressive Russia and a surveillance happy US government with a President who is more comfortable with dictators than the democratically elected.  At the same time it is clear that there will be glut of low lying satellite capacity in the near future. Starlink has obviously a huge lead over the European project. In addition, marketing juggernaut Amazon began deployment in early 2024 of its 3,236 satellite system. Customer acquisition costs often determine th...

 Dubious EU Funded Submarine Projects - Polar Connect. The EU embodies activist government. It is seeding a large number of digital infrastructure projects many of which have only a small chance of success. My nomination for the most dubious EU-backed subsea cable initiative is Polar Connect. The idea is to connect Europe to Asia via a subsea cable that is deployed directly under the polar cap to link Japan to Europe. The backers of this plan include NorduNet, the Swedish Research Council, and others. EU has committed 5.6 million Euros to the project over three years for initial design and research.  This project takes advantage of the EU's lack of submarine cable expertise and its perennial itch to intervene in capitalism in the belief that it has the wisdom to improve it. NorduNet has unscrupulously been tossing out capex estimates of under $250 million. This is absurd. Such a project would require a specialized cable ship plus two icebreakers. And there would have to be a s...