Subsea cable risks are only increasing

Another day, another cable break. Or in the case of Finland this week, two cable breaks.

As it turned out, the cables were accidentally cut during construction work. Not an unusual occurrence. But following the sabotage of two Baltic Sea cables two weeks ago, the incident attracted a good deal of media coverage.

Security experts believe an anchor dragged the Baltic Sea cables some 100km, and have noted the presence of a Chinese vessel, the Yi Peng, in the area. Swedish authorities have called for it to return to Swedish waters. It is reportedly still anchored off Denmark.

Last week Chinese authorities finally offered to co-operate – although they have also managed to get into a diplomatic spat with Lithuania over the issue.

Chinese officials were less helpful in the case of the disruption of two fiber cables and a gas pipeline between Estonia and Finland 14 months ago.

After an internal investigation, Beijing acknowledged that a Hong Kong-registered ship had damaged the gas pipeline during a storm. The vessel's anchor was found on the seabed, so there was not much room for deniability. But there's been no word on the broken fiber cables, however.

'Grayzone attack'

Former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen warns these attempts to sabotage European cables need to be seen in the context of other strikes at critical infrastructure, like the arson incidents in the French rail network prior to the Olympics and the still-unsolved Nord Stream pipeline explosions in 2022. Not to mention the open threats, such as that issued by former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, to cut western Europe's cables because of the EU's support for Ukraine.

Taiwan, another geopolitical hotspot, is also subject to frequent cable breaks, such as the severing of links to offshore islands early last year. It has recorded more than 20 such incidents in recent years.

Almost certainly the cables were severed by a Chinese fishing vessel in a so-called "grayzone attack" – a quasi-military action aimed at testing Taiwan's response.

These events have highlighted the vulnerability of the world's 1.4 million kilometers of subsea cables that between them carry $10 trillion in transactions a day.

Believe it or not, a group of US finance officials and internet engineers, led by the US Federal Reserve, has been working on subsea cable resilience since 2008.

Known as the Rogucci group (an acronym for Reliability of Global Undersea Communication Cables Infrastructure), they are now warning of heightened risks to subsea cable systems, according to FT.com.

Significantly they are also embracing the widely held industry view that cable repair ships are the most pressing need.

Cable owners can mitigate loss of capacity through in-built redundancy, and they can adopt advanced sensors to quickly identify the location of outages. But there is only so much that can be done in the worst-case scenario of multiple cable cuts.

Hence the need for rapid response by repair teams. The Tonga break in January 2022, which took the island state completely offline, took a month to repair. Other cable disruptions can take three months or longer, while routine maintenance work often needs to be booked a year in advance.

The Rogucci group is calling for $5 billion in funding to triple the world's cable maintenance fleet.

That's a lot of money in tough times, and it's not clear where it's going to come from. But the escalating number of attacks is ensuring the issue will increasingly hold the attention of decision-makers.