Shrinking Arctic ice redraws the map for internet cable connections

Thawing ice in the Arctic may open up new routes for internet cables that lie at the bottom of the ocean and carry most international data traffic. And more routes matter when underwater infrastructure is at risk of attack.

Baltic Sea gas and telecoms cables were damaged last year, with a Chinese vessel a potential suspect.

Red Sea data cables were cut earlier this month after a Yemeni government warning of attacks by Iran-backed Houthi rebels. Over 90 percent of all Europe-Asia traffic flows through the Red Sea route.

The problem of critical data relying on only one path is clear.

"It's clearly a kind of concentration of several cables, which means that there is a risk that areas will bottleneck," Taneli Vuorinen, the executive vice president at Cinia, a Finland-based company working on an innovative pan-Arctic cable, said.

"In order to meet the increasing demand, there's an increasing pressure to find diversity" of routes, he said.

The Far North Fiber project is seeking to offer just that. The 14,500 kilometer long cable will directly link Europe to Japan, via the Northwest Passage in the Arctic, with landing sites in Japan, the United States (Alaska), Canada, Norway, Finland and Ireland.

It would have been unthinkable until just a few years ago, when a thick, multiyear layer of ice made navigation impossible.

But the Arctic is warming up at a worrying pace with climate change, nearly four times faster than the rest of the world. Sea ice is shrinking by almost 13 percent every decade.

Ik Icard, the chief strategy officer for Far North Digital, another company working on the project said the summer thaws now allow ships to install the cable while the winter freeze limits disruptions.

"We are at this sweet spot where it's now accessible and allows us a time window when we can get the sable safely installed" while enjoying "the protection of that ice cover for a significant part of the year" against human threats, from anchor drops to sabotage attempts, .

After the marine survey is completed, Nokia's subsidiary Alcatel Submarine Networks will start manufacturing the parts and roll them out by 2027, when it is set to go live.

The European Union is a fan, pouring about €23 million into the project under CEF Digital, the main financial tool supporting connectivity across the bloc. The European Commission recently called on EU governments to better secure their underwater networks and it wants new cable projects to fill strategic gaps.

Far North Digital co-founder Ethan Berkowitz wants to get more governments on board.

"We look for more vocal support from the United States and Canada," he said, citing the world geopolitical situation as a compelling reason for them to act.

"Nobody wants to cut a cable under the ice, it's really hard to do," he said.

A blessing and a curse

Although the shorter itinerary followed by the cable will allow lower latency — meaning a quicker transfer of data — operating in the Arctic can prove more challenging, and costly.

"The very ice that helps to protect the cable, in the unlikely event of damage, makes it more difficult to fix it," Icard explained, meaning it could take weeks or even months to repair, depending on the time of the year.

Ice scouring — when floating ice drifts into shallower areas and grinds the seabed —can also pose a threat. A broadband outage occurred in Alaska last summer after an undersea fiber optic line was severed by chunks of Arctic ice.

"The design of our system is that if there is a fault, we can reroute traffic," Berkowitz said.

The €1 billion cost of completing the project far outweighs other routes.

A cable across the Atlantic would cost around €250 million, said Alan Mauldin, the research director at TeleGeography, a Washington-based consulting firm. Laying a a cable in the Pacific could be around €320 million.

"Technically, it is feasible to do it but the question is commercial. Just because the cable has a unique route compared to other systems, you can't charge more for that," Mauldin said.

Cinia's Vuorinen said there is "a lot of interest" already from potential customers, such as Big Tech looking to diversify intercontinental connections to the defense and security community who could use a safer route. "The objective is to have a commercially viable project," he said.

If the project sets sail smoothly, it might just blaze a trail for others to dive into the opportunities of the Arctic's increasingly open waters. Scientists recently warned that the Arctic Ocean could even soon have its first "ice-free" days.