Stories about sabotaged and threatened subsea cables abound, but there are silver linings too as space comms look destined to move from radio to lasers
The ongoing threat to subsea cables by terrorists and state-backed actors is hyping up tension between nations but it is also encouraging the building of more cables for resilience and new satellite technologies. Indeed, cutting undersea cables is seen as element of hybrid warfare, such as allegedly employed in Europe by Russia against NATO members or Ukraine’s allies.
Just days ago, a Russian intelligence-gathering vessel was escorted out of Irish waters by the Irish navy. The Irish Times said it was seen flying drones in the Irish Sea, about three miles from the location of undersea cables.
But Russia is not the only suspected saboteur: at the time of writing, a Chinese carrier, Yi Peng 3, is being monitored by a Danish naval patrol vessel in the Sea of Kattegat, off the coast of Jutland, Denmark according to the The Guardian. The Swedish police investigating the apparent sabotage of two undersea cables in the Baltic Sea have said a Chinese ship is “of interest” as it passed the two cables on Sunday and Monday about the time they were apparently maliciously severed.
It should be remembered that China threatened Sweden, as well as Swedish companies, promised reprisals for banning Huawei equipment in 5G networks back in 2021. Revenge is famously a dish best served cold.
More than regional difficulties
Cutting cables isn’t about causing a little regional difficulty for your immediate enemies either. Sabotage in one region can have serious consequences in others, as demonstrated by cuts in submarine cables in the Red Sea in February showed.
RETN, which runs a private, global managed network, says that the impact of the February 2024 cable cuts on Europe and Asia was severely underestimated. Who was responsible for those cables being cut is not clear, but there is concern they were targeted by the Yemeni Houthis rebel group as part of its campaign to pressure Israel to end its attacks on Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
Surge in subsea cables
Still, perhaps there are two silver linings. First, since 2020, there has been a surge in the building of undersea cables: more than 25% of all cables launched since 2010 have gone live since 2024, according to Analysy Mason’s tracker.
They have been built to meet the demands of rising traffic, through increased investment by hyperscalers and because of demands for better resilience. Another 68 cables are expected by 2027.
Source: Analysys Mason, Submarine Cable Tracker
This article on the top 10 subsea cables, published in August in DataCentre magazine makes interesting reading too.
Satellite picks up the pace
Clearly as the expansion of communications satellite constellations continues, it too potentially provides greater resilience, particularly with the rise of direct-to-device (aka direct-to-cellular) technologies. According to Juniper Research in September, the direct-to-device revenues will be worth will be $2.8 billion over next five years, up from $30 million in 2025, when commercial services will launch.
Nor is it just the newbie satellite constellation offering direct-to-device or cell. In January, Iridium announced it is developing a new direct-to-cell service called Project Stardust that will allow standard smartphones to connect to its LEO satellite network. That was in the same week that Starlink demo’d its first text message via direct-to-cell.
Another big milestone was in October, when Elon Musk’s SpaceX ran a trial in Romania to prove that its Starlink satellites could support up to 8 times their current capacity without interfering with Geostationary satellite networks if only the ITU would abandon or relax its 25-year old equivalent power flux density (EPFD) limits. Although the World Radio Conference 2023 kicked the can down the road regarding EPFD it seems only a matter of time before they are revised.
200Gbps comms in space
Maybe there was an even bigger milestone last year, which has had much less attention but could have far bigger implications. The Financial Times [subscription needed] reports that in 2023, Nasa fired a tiny laser back to Earth from an orbiting satellite which transmitted data at 200Gbps, sending 3.6 terabytes of data to our planet in 6 minutes.
As the FT points out, for comparison, the $10 billion James Webb telescope launched in 2021 can send about 57 gigabytes of scientific data per day. That’s because the telescope, like communication satellites, uses radio frequencies whereas Nasa’s trial used light or optical communications technology from French company Cailabs (picture courtesy of Cailabs shows its headquarters in Rennes, France).
The company originally focused on telecoms and achieved a world record, with Japanese operator KDDI, for how much data its fibre optics could carry back in 2013. It is still making those products today.
In 2019, another Japanese firm, NEC, suggested the company should use its tech for aerospace and eventually won a contract from the French Ministry of Defence. One expert told the FT that he expects to see a huge shift to optical communications in space over the next decade, with giants like Airbus and Safran now also working on the technology.