- The EU is considering routing subsea cables through the Artic
- It aims to avoid regions of conflict and instability such as Russia and Iran
- The routes are projected to cost €2 billion and be operational by 2030
If you currently access or communicate with the internet in Asia as a European, around 90% of your traffic travels via subsea internet cables in the Middle East.
Given the recent conflict between the US and Iran, expanding capacity and building new projects has been a bit of a non-starter, as Meta well knows.
To combat this bottleneck, and to avoid the obvious troubles of navigating the internet via Russia, the European Union wants to take the Northwest Passage, or transit the North Pole.
Putting the internet on ice
The two proposed solutions, under the name Polar Connect, come with their own challenges, but apparently the EU is willing to take icebergs and thick sea ice over a region of periodic instability and Vladimir Putin, so much so that the EU has listed Polar Connect as a priority project with an operational goal of 2030.
For one route, going via the Northwest Passage in Canada to Asia, there is the obvious issue that has plagued navigators from John Cabot to John Franklin: the region is packed with sea ice. The unfortunate silver lining is that climate change has reduced the Arctic ice pack by a considerable amount, making the route a viable option.
As for the North Pole route, the cables would start in Scandinavia and travel across the North Pole.
Both routes would require specialist ice-breaking cable-laying equipment with a hefty price tag, or one ship to break ice and another to lay cable – which is equally expensive. But the costs seem to be a reasonable price to pay to have a more reliable connection with Asia.
This isn’t the first time undersea cables have been laid beneath the Arctic ocean. Quintillion was the last company to attempt such a venture, and had some success. A length of cable began at Nome, ran along the northern coast of Alaska, and reached Prudhoe Bay. Unfortunately, icebergs can drag their lower halves across the bottom of the seafloor at depths beyond that of an undersea cable, damaging or even cutting them in an event known as an “ice scour”.
When Quintillion encountered this problem in June 2023, they did not have access to an icebreaker and so had to wait for the ice to melt before being able to repair the cable. The same happened again in January 2025, leading to an eight month downtime leaving many Alaskans without high-speed internet. Quintillion never laid the rest of the route to Asia.
But given the expense of attempting to lay, repair cables — and navigate the potential taxation of undersea cables by unfriendly nations in the Red Sea or the Gulf of Aden — a €2 billion route through the Arctic provides Europe with sovereignty over their cables, and the data flowing through it.
Via The Verge
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benedict.collins@futurenet.com (Benedict Collins)
