The volatile global political environment hasn't led to more attacks on subsea cables – but it's made it harder for them to get approved.

That's the view of Kent Bressie, international legal adviser to the International Cable Protection Committee (ICPC), who says he blames the media for "distorting the reality of cable outages."

He said ICPC's data showed "there is not a greater statistical frequency of malicious damaged cables."

"There have been some low-frequency, high-impact events, obviously. But any good student of submarine cable history knows that this has been the story of submarine cables since their conception, and that has not changed," he told a panel session at the annual submarine networks conference in Singapore Wednesday. 

Bressie was referring to the severing of multiple Red Sea cables in February, cutting Asia-Europe bandwidth by a quarter – most likely the result of anchor drag by a vessel sunk by Yemen Houthi rebels.  

Although not a subsea cable incident, the attack on the Nord Stream pipeline in September 2022, reportedly by a Ukrainian group, has also caught the attention of the international community. 

Bressie said about 70% of cable damage each year is caused by anchors or fishing gear on the seabed.

Holistic approach 

He said while governments were right to worry about rare, high-impact events, he feared media sensationalism was causing resources to be diverted away from other sources of faults.

"For the ICPC, a fault is a fault. It has, regardless of cause, equal potential for disrupting the continuity of communications. And governments need to be taking a more holistic approach to risk, not just the malicious ones," Bressie said. 

The increased public focus on threats to cables is one consequence of rising geopolitical tensions.

Another is the much more stringent permitting process, with Bressie warning that cable licensing has become much more burdensome in many countries. 

He said that in addition to the regular telecom licensing concerns, new cable applications faced scrutiny of their supply chain, physical and virtual security, personnel and even customer lists, Bressie said. 

Ironically, this was happening at a time when governments were trying to rationalize and expedite licensing, "but it is taking longer than ever."

Richard Sun, deputy CEO of Malaysia's OMS, which provides a permitting service as part of its cable construction business, agreed the approvals process had become much more complicated.

He says rising geopolitical pressure is only one factor, however. The other is the greater government scrutiny of submarine cables as they realize how critical they are to their Internet infrastructure. 

Amit Vyas, CEO of Aqua Comms India, said the protracted approvals process had reduced the viability of cable investments for smaller operators. 

He said a project that six years ago might have taken two years to complete "now takes easily four to five years."

"This is primarily because of permitting and the time it takes to get all the relevant permits to survey and build a new cable," he said during a discussion on cable financing.