The EU wants to build an internet and submarine cable in the Arctic

The world’s information – e-mail, financial transactions, the Internet – is carried by fiber optic cables that run under the sea and switch over a relatively narrow area. From time to time, policymakers release reports showing that the system looks dangerous, but these methods are very short, have been used since the time of the telegraph, and the system has been very successful. Cables break all the time, and cars are replaced until a repair train comes to repair the track. But the Iran war, which comes after several years of conflict in Yemen, is encouraging governments and companies to consider other options, including crossing the North Pole.

The ongoing crisis began in 2024, when a Houthi missile hit a cargo ship in the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait off the coast of Yemen, causing the ship to drift for days. pulling in his anchor past three of the more than a dozen lines of ships passing through the narrow channel of the Red Sea.

Cable repair is done by special ships to collect the broken parts and join them together. It’s a delicate task that involves slowly dragging logs to the bottom of the ocean and floating them for hours while the threads are tied together, nothing can be done safely in a war zone. Therefore, it took more than four months to return the necessary contracts bring the ship. Last September, another one four strings it was cut off, possibly by a merchant ship pulling anchor, and disrupted Internet traffic in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Again, months of discussion before planning begins.

The shrinking of the Red Sea encouraged companies and governments to look for alternatives, and the Strait of Hormuz seemed attractive. Then the US and Israel attacked Iran, cable services were suspended, and the world looked elsewhere.

“When the Red Sea shut everything down, everybody ran to the Persian Gulf, and now you can’t do that,” said Roderick Beck, a veteran of cable companies that take on ISPs. “The Persian Gulf will never return to what it was before, when the Iranians could not control it.”

The Gulf countries, which have been aggressively building data centers in an attempt to shift their economies from oil to AI, want to avoid the Red Sea by crossing over land, build a way to Europe via Syria, Iraq, and Oman. But the most ambitious proposal is in Europe, where repeated cable-cutting is forcing the continent to focus on the Arctic.

Earlier this year, the European Union group on cable security He recommended the construction of two Arctic cables to find a way to Asia without crossing the Red Sea, through which 90% of European traffic passes. One cable runs through northwestern Canada. The other would connect Scandinavia and Asia via the North Pole.

The second of these methods is already in the preliminary stages. Called Polar Connect, it is led by staff from the Nordic academic-network, the Swedish polar research institute, and the telecom company GlobalConnect Carrier. This year, the EU named it a “Cable Project of European Interest” and has invested around 9 million euros in the project. (The EU report estimated the total cost to be around 2 billion.) A transport survey is scheduled for this summer.

“It started before the riots, but the political situation has created an interest in finding alternatives,” said Pär Jansson, Vice President (Carrier) at GlobalConnect, the telecom company that operates Polar. The group white paper says European data currently has three routes to Asia, none of them good: through the Red Sea, through Russia, or to the US, “a long route controlled by non-European organizations.” The cable would make Europe’s data infrastructure more robust, reduce latency between the EU and Asia, and “strengthen Europe’s autonomy,” Jansson said, adding that it would also allow better environmental monitoring in the Arctic.

Others have tried the Arctic cable, without success. “People have been talking about this for at least 20 years,” said Alan Mauldin, director of research at TeleGeography, an industry research firm. Deploying these ships would be difficult and expensive, requiring refitting a ship to the Arctic and buying scrap ships to take to the North Pole. But the real obstacle is maintenance.

“What if the cable is damaged, it’s called ice scour, when the ice hits the cable and destroys it. So you can’t fix it until summer,” Mauldin said. “We’ve seen a lot of jobs come and go. There’s a reason for that, right?

Beck raised the same reformation issue. “The problem is the ice,” Beck said. They can drag down the bottom of the ocean, digging up shafts longer than the cable that is buried. “This is what happened to Quintillion. Twice.”

Quintillion was the last attempt on the Arctic cable. In 2016 it acquired the property of Arctic Fiberand the past attempt to build an Arctic cable between Europe and Asia. Quintillion started a section that ran from Nome on the northern coast of Alaska to Prudhoe Bay, but in June 2023, the sea ice broke up. With no shipwrecks, Quintillion had to wait for the summer ice to melt. fix the cable. Then in January last year, the ice hit again. This time in the dead of winter. no one could fix it cable for eight months. The rest of the way is not fixed at all.

The high maintenance cost and long-term potential make the Arctic cable unattractive, Mauldin and Beck said. The question is whether governments now see the cable as an important enough to expand. “I think the EU is very big on this because they think it’s an independent right, but it’s going to be very expensive. It’s never been done before,” Beck said.

Jansson is aware of the challenges, but believes that the new world environment and new technologies will make it possible. Tech companies are building data centers in the Nordic countries, he said, and they will need faster and more stable connections, but ultimately they will need public money. He puts the cost of the Norway-Japan match at “less than 1 billion euros.”

The goal is to be alive in 2030. That may be the easy part.