Several high-profile outages of subsea cables this year have caused major interruptions to global internet traffic and led to cable network providers to consider how to instill greater resilience in their networks.
These are existential questions for operators, but something that gets little discussion until things go majorly wrong, and so MNOs should be evaluating their emergency traffic action plans. Another major outage is around the corner, and being on the ground at the Capacity Europe event highlighted these risks.
Damage to connections to the Middle East and Africa are reported to have forced 30% of internet traffic from Europe to Asia to be rerouted onto terrestrial or satellite networks – with impacts on quality and latency of traffic. The impetus is greater than ever to provide alternative routes and partnerships to manage the risk of disruption.
In March, a sunken ship damaged subsea cables in the Red Sea, forcing internet providers to reroute as much as 25% of traffic between Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
Four cables were cut by an anchor from an abandoned ship that had been sunk by Houthi fighters, an armed political and religious group from Yemen fighting against Israel, the US and its supporters.
Meanwhile in Africa, accidental cable cuts in March and May of this year had the same impact. In March, thirteen countries in West and South Africa experienced internet outages due to damage to submarine fiber optic cables. In mid-May, two fiber optic submarine cables (SEACOM and EASSy) were damaged off the coast of South Africa, likely caused by a dragging ship anchor, limiting connectivity in multiple East African countries.
Speakers at a panel on the topic at Capacity Europe conference in London discussed how best to address diversification. According to Tansy McCluskie, part of the EMEA Network Investments team at Meta, the hyperscalers are doing well to protect the delivery of their content.
“We have two networks that we are focused on. We have a production network for our own data centers, traffic can move slower on this network if needed. Then we have an edge network that supplies content to users. It is vital that this network is low latency,” said McCluskie.
“We experience quite a bit of failure in our subsea network, as a result of fishing boats for example. This is why diversity of cables across the Atlantic, for example, is very important,” McCluskie added.
Meta invests heavily in guaranteeing that its customer-facing cable network is as reliable as possible, McCluskie said. The company’s 2Africa cable, for example, goes both ways around the continent in case there is disruption on one side. “We can go in any direction and we see it as a volume game, because we can afford to,” said McCluskie.
McCluskie also highlighted the unified attitude in the subsea cable industry, where participants step in to help each other to maintain connectivity in the case of an outage.
“We all understand the impact, so we come together to provide resiliency,” she said.
One area of particular importance is the corridor between Europe and Asia, given the boom in high-performance computing centers in both locations.
As a means to cater to these two industrial centers Jorgen Qvist, the COO of NORDUnet, is looking into laying subsea cables across the Arctic. This is part of a strategy called Vision 2030 which would lay a ring of cables around the Arctic, connecting Asia and Europe, by 2030.
“We have identified and created an ambitious, innovative, and realistic vision for two submarine cables between Northern Europe and East Asia, i.e. one across the Northwest Passage (‘Far North Fiber’) and one west of the Geographic North Pole (‘Polar Connect’). In this vision, these two submarine cables will form a resilient ring on a new and unexploited route,” says the Vision 2030 report.
The report argues that the current routes for subsea cables are too unstable. “At the moment, there is no attractive alternative for connectivity between Europe and Asia, as the three existing paths all have issues,” it says.
The main routes are across North America, through the Suez Canal, or through Siberia. These routes, NORDUnet argues, are either too long, expensive, or vulnerable to political instability.
Although geopolitical issues are already hindering the Vision 2030 plans.
The route would require transversing 2,000 km of ice and the only icebreakers (special purpose ships for icy conditions) are made by Russian companies and are therefore under embargo for European companies because of the Ukraine war.
“And you cannot speak to the Artic Council about the issue because it is led by Russia. We have not been able to hold a meeting in a couple of years,” said Qvist.
In a separate deal, last week TIM’s cable unit Sparkle joined a project operated by Liberty Networks and Gold Data to provide diverse subsea cable routes between the US, Mexico and South America called MANTA.
Liberty Networks and Gold Data have been discussing plans to bring together two subsea cable systems since last year. The goal is to offer two diverse routes with the shortest latency from Mexico to the US and elsewhere in South America. The project is expected to be active from late 2026.