- EU plans to route submarine cables across the Arctic
- It aims to avoid regions of conflict and instability like Russia and Iran.
- The roads are expected to cost 2 billion euros and be operational by 2030.
If you currently access or communicate with the Internet in Asia as a European, approximately 90% of your traffic passes through underwater Internet cables in the Middle East.
Given the recent conflict between the United States and Iran, expanding capabilities and building new projects has been somewhat doomed to failure, as Meta well knows.
To combat this bottleneck and avoid the obvious problems associated with Internet browsing via Russia, the European Union wants to use the Northwest Passage, or transit through the North Pole.
Putting the Internet on ice
Both proposed solutions, under the name Polar Connect, come with their own challenges, but apparently the EU is ready 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 a 2030 operational target.
For a route, through Canada’s Northwest Passage to Asia, there is the obvious problem that plagued navigators from John Cabot to John Franklin: the region is filled with sea ice. The sad silver lining is that climate change has significantly reduced Arctic sea ice, making this route a viable option.
As for the North Pole route, the cables would start from Scandinavia and cross the North Pole.
Both routes would require expensive, specialized ice-breaking cable-laying equipment, or one vessel to break the ice and another to lay the cables – which is equally expensive. But the costs seem like a reasonable price to pay for a more reliable connection to Asia.
This is not the first time that submarine cables have been laid under the Arctic Ocean. Quintillion was the last company to attempt such an adventure and enjoyed some success. A length of cable ran from Nome along the northern coast of Alaska to Prudhoe Bay. Unfortunately, icebergs can drag their lower halves across the seafloor to depths greater than an underwater cable, damaging or even severing them in an event known as “glacial scour.”
When Quintillion encountered this problem in June 2023, it did not have access to an icebreaker and so had to wait for the ice to melt before it could repair the cable. The same thing happened again in January 2025, leading to an eight-month outage, leaving many Alaskans without high-speed internet. Quintillion never charted the rest of the route to Asia.
But given the expense of laying and repairing the cables – and the potential taxation of undersea cables by hostile nations in the Red Sea or Gulf of Aden – a €2 billion route across the Arctic gives Europe sovereignty over its cables and the data that travels there.
Via The edge
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