NATO plans to build satellite links as backups to undersea cables — recent cable damage incidents shine spotlight on Project HEIST

Because of the increasing number of undersea cable disruptions happening in the past couple of years, NATO is building on a system that will locate damage to undersea cables with an accuracy of one meter and find more routes that data can take if a disruption does occur in a particular line. This project will be called HEIST, says the IEEE in a report, which stands for Hybrid Space-Submarine Architecture Ensuring Infosec of Telecommunications.

The value of transactions transmitted through undersea cables exceeds $10 trillion in total, with Henric Johnson, the vice-chancellor of Blekinge Institute of Technology (BTH) and HEIST testbed coordinator, saying, “What we’re talking about now is critical infrastructure in the society.” BTH, located in Karlskrona, near the southern coast of Sweden, is one of the partners in the HEIST program. Engineers will work there to develop smart systems that allow cable breaks to be quickly located and develop protocols to quickly and automatically reroute the affected data to satellites.

“We have had incidents of cables that have been sabotaged between Sweden, Estonia, and Finland,” added Johnson. “So those incidents are, for us, a reality.”

Although it may seem that undersea cables are tough infrastructure because of the environment they’re in, these intercontinental connections are very fragile. That’s because these cables, about the thickness of a garden hose, lie on the seafloor instead of being buried underneath. Anything dragging on the ocean floor—a sea creature, a loose anchor, or a submarine—could easily damage or even sever these communications cables.

This shows how fragile our internet-driven world is, especially given that over 95% of global data traffic is carried through these undersea fiber optics. About a hundred cable cuts happen each year, with about 600 undersea cables globally, meaning that about 16% of global connections are down yearly. Although there are specially designed ships stationed worldwide to repair faults as soon as they happen, these often take days or weeks and could cost millions of dollars.

Satellites are the primary backups to undersea cables, but their bandwidth is far behind physical connections. For example, Google’s latest fiber-optic lines can hit 340 terabits per second. In contrast, the frequency used by most satellites—12 to 18GHz—can only handle about 5 gigabits per second or about 0.0015% of the maximum throughput of Google’s fiber connection.

Work is underway to upgrade satellites from radio transmissions to lasers, increasing the speed by about 40 times to 200 Gbps. Starlink already uses this technology to communicate between its satellites, while Amazon is also developing it for its own Project Kuiper. However, it still faces challenges, like poor visibility and targeting precision between the satellite and ground station.

Because this is a major NATO project, the alliance plans to open-source part of the process. Making it public would allow anyone interested to find holes and make many iterations. Gregory Falco, the NATO Country Director for HEIST, believes that this is the fastest way for the project to achieve its goals and help prevent any catastrophic loss of data transmission in case of deliberate attacks against these underwater infrastructures in international waters.