Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

The EU has given tens of millions of Euros in preliminary development funds to kick start an Arctic cable that would bypass North America and connect Northern Europe to Japan. There have been ongoing efforts for over a decade to execute such a project, the most recent incarnation is Polar Connect. The idea is to create a new, highly diverse and ultra-low latency route linking Europe to Asia that bypasses the politically unstable Middle East and the less-than-friendly and lukewarm American ally. Although there could be some Russian harassment due to concerns about the cable serving as a surveillance tool via sensors attached it, the path looks downright idyllic in terms of the political environment relative to the Middle East. However, a glance at the map shows the immense challenge. One of the unwritten rules of cable deployment is to avoid shallow waters. Most recently built cables head immediately from their landing points to deep sea as quickly as possible. Ships infe...

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...

Japan suffers from a lack of physical diversity in cable landings. For example, the Maruyama CLS serves 8 cables, most of them major Internet arteries including ASE, APG, Jupiter, TPE, and ADC. According to the Submarine Networks website the country has more than 20 facilities. However, they are densely concentrated as the map below shows. Moreover, it would not be surprising if many of the are sharing back haul fibre. Consequently, the Japanese government is giving money to Softbank for the construction of two new cable landing stations in the Hokkaido and Fukuoka projects because they make nations's telecommunications more robust The project's anchor tenant is the ETA (East to America) subsea cable.  In general I am skeptical of subsidies for a variety of very good reasons, namely they usually distort the allocation of resources in pursuit  of political gain. However, aid for new cable landings that are diverse to the existing landing infrastructure may be exception. It woul...