The European Commission is considering financing a fibre optic cable to connect Europe to Asia via the Arctic and avoid existing choke points, two EU officials familiar with the matter told EURACTIV under the condition of anonymity.

The consortium behind the Far North Fiber project is formed by Alaskan company Far North Digital and Finland’s Cinia. The cable would be 14,000 km long and connect Scandinavia and Ireland to Japan, passing via the Arctic, with landings in Greenland, Canada and Alaska.

Cinia initially conceived the project in 2018, passing by the Northeast Passage polar route in collaboration with the Russian telecom operator MegaFon. The deal fell apart last year due to the mounting geopolitical tensions with Moscow. In turn, Russia is preparing to launch its own Arctic cable, Polar Express, in 2026.

The infrastructure plan was consequently reconfigured in December 2021 to traverse the Northwest Passage, and it has been on the lookout for investors to finance a total cost estimated at $1.15 billion.

Passing through the Arctic would also mean the cable would be shorter than the existing ones, reducing the so-called data latency, the time the information takes to travel from one point to the other.

“It’d be a very expensive cable, and the commercial viability of it is uncertain. Lower latency in itself does not determine if a cable gets built,” said Alan Mauldin, research director at TeleGeography, a telecommunications market research company.

In this regard, ongoing geopolitical tensions might play into the project’s hand as European policymakers started looking at it as a strategic asset.

The cable would be the first to connect Europe to Asia without passing via the Suez Channel in Egypt, a critical choke point regarding internet infrastructure and international trade. Following the recent sabotage of the North Stream pipelines, suspected to be of Russian origin, Brussels is growing wary of these single points of failure.

The Italian company Sparkle is already building a cable that would circumvent Suez via Israel, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, but that would not address the dependency on the geopolitical context of a single region.

The European Commission first presented the idea of co-financing the Far North Fiber to representatives of EU countries last week.

The EU wants to present it as one of the main achievements of transatlantic cooperation at the next ministerial meeting of the EU-US Trade and Technology Council in December.

However, EURACTIV understands that the support of Washington is not confirmed because the United States is not yet convinced that this route would be a strategic priority for them.

Militarisation of the Arctic

The project would fit in a broader context of the militarisation of the Arctic, a region that is increasingly creating geopolitical tensions as the melting of glaciers is opening up strategic trade routes and raw materials reserves.

The EU last year adopted its first Arctic strategy, which also made a reference to investing in connectivity and critical infrastructure, reflecting the growing anxiety over geopolitical tensions in the Arctic at a time when China, Russia and the US are already fighting for influence in the region.

“Critical infrastructure is the new frontier of warfare, and the EU will be prepared,” Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told the Digital Summit in Tallinn on Monday (10 October).

In fact, the disruption of marine networks dates back to the First World War, when one of the first acts of the Brits was to destroy Germany’s undersea telegraph cables, cutting them off from global communications and establishing the first surveillance system on a global scale.

“We obviously see we are more vulnerable now,” the second EU official told EURACTIV, noting that the issue was neglected for a long-time, but now many EU countries, especially in the north of Europe, are pushing to diversify their underwater cables.

France, Europe’s military heavyweight, is ramping up its deep-sea capacity as part of a military programme to counter hybrid threats on underwater telecommunications infrastructure.

The Arctic optic cable might also have a military dimension, as military infrastructure would be the first to be targeted in case of an escalation.

In the last plenary debate in the European Parliament, von der Leyen set out a five-point plan for enhancing the security of the critical submarine infrastructure. A fundamental component is the use of satellite systems to monitor naval traffic.

A major station of the European Space Agency that connects with its Galileo satellite system is based in Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. In January, the undersea cables connecting Norway’s Svalbard Satellite Station to the mainland were severed.

A few months earlier, a network of undersea sensors of the Norwegian Ocean Observatory was also cut, prompting suspicions of sabotage. Russia was the primary suspect also in this case, as it is one of the few countries with such capabilities.

As the European satellite system is set to play a critical role in monitoring critical marine infrastructure, cutting that off would severely cripple the EU’s response capacity.

The European Space Agency did not respond to EURACTIV’s inquiry on how sabotage of seabed communications would affect the functioning of the Galileo satellite system. The European Commission and Far North Digital also did not provide a comment by the time of publication.

[Edited by Alexandra Brzozowski/Zoran Radosavljevic]

Source: Εuractiv.com