What Will It Take to Connect the Arctic? $1.2 Billion, 10,000 Miles of Fiber-Optic Cable and Patience
UTQIAGVIK , Alaska—Nestled between the whalebone-marked graves of long-dead whaling captains, an arctic fox den and a snow-covered beach, a series of satellite dishes point at the horizon from this northern Alaskan town.
Far from the superfast fiber-optic cables that provide internet connectivity to other parts of the world, Arctic towns like Utqiagvik have typically relied on more limited, less reliable satellite connections. It means that students can rarely stream educational videos, hospitals spend hours uploading medical scans and scientists sometimes struggle to simply open emails.
more on connecting the arcitc
The Arctic is one of the world’s last digital frontiers. Subsea fiber-optic cables, which carry over 99% of intercontinental voice and data traffic, have traversed most of the world’s oceans, but so far not the Arctic Ocean, historically limited by the region’s ice sheet.
As that ice sheet has started melting due to climate change, telecommunications companies have looked to the area—where Asia, Europe and North America are closer than they are at any other point on Earth—for a shorter, potentially more efficient route for data flows across the three continents.
“Climate change is even making it technically all the time easier,” said AJ Knaapila, president and chief executive of Finnish telecommunications, cybersecurity and software company Cinia Oy, which, along with partners, hopes to build a submarine fiber-optic cable through the Arctic in coming years, a project estimated to cost roughly $1.2 billion.
An Arctic route would offer the shortest connection between London and Tokyo, carrying implications for industries like financial trading, where milliseconds can make the difference between profits and losses. It would also bring much-needed connectivity to rural northern towns like Utqiagvik, formerly Barrow, transforming one of the least digital regions to a major digital crossroads. Additionally, it could offer geopolitical advantages to whoever controls the flow of information, in a region where tensions are high between Russia and the West.
But what has looked so compelling on a map has been difficult to construct in reality. For more than two decades, Arctic cable routes have been planned, scrapped and delayed, in part due to the challenges of funding a first-of-its-kind project in the icy, hostile environment. Now firms tackling the next generation of Arctic projects are again facing questions about whether the prospect could ever become reality—or whether the Arctic will remain what it always has been: unconnected.
‘You look at a map and you see a need’
Cinia in the past year and a half formed a joint venture with
Arteria Networks Corp.
of Japan and Alaska’s Far North Digital LLC on the project. The current estimate for the length of the cable stands at around 16,880 kilometers, or about 10,500 miles, although the final length could vary, according to Alcatel Submarine Networks, the
Nokia Corp.
subsidiary contracted by the joint venture to lay the cable.
“This is an essential piece of infrastructure,” said Far North President Ethan Berkowitz. “To me, it’s a question of: You look at a map and you see a need.”
The planned far north fiber-optic route will contain between 12 and 16 fiber pairs, with each pair having a capacity of 15 terabits per second.
Photo:
Cinia Oy
With a route survey beginning this year, the cable system is scheduled to be operational in 2026. But when asked about the likelihood of that timeline being met, a Cinia official expressed uncertainty.
“If you ask four of us, you will get four different answers,” said Taneli Vuorinen, Cinia’s executive vice president of Global Connectivity.
Cinia, which is owned 77.5% by the Finnish government, is already a veteran of one failed effort. In 2019, Cinia partnered with Russian company MegaFon on an earlier project designed to route cable east from Europe over the Russian Arctic to Asia. It fell apart in 2021 after the Russian government’s support of the project started to fade and the geopolitical risks of operating a data flow so close to Russia felt too high, Cinia said.
The company packed up its research and partnered with Arteria and Far North Digital on the new cable project, going west from Europe, through the Northwest Passage in Canada, over Alaska and landing in Japan.
The new cable must earn more than $80 million annually during its roughly 25-year lifespan to be profitable, Cinia said.
The partners are self-funding the project with revenue from other areas of their business, while they search for funding from outside investors and future customers. Before survey work can begin later this year, the companies say they need to sell about half the capacity.
The potential for low-latency communications is one of its biggest selling points, according to Mr. Knaapila. A bank in London transmitting data to Tokyo could do so 30% to 40% faster via an Arctic route than through existing subsea routes—a roughly 35-millisecond advantage one way—according to Tim Stronge, analyst at subsea cable analysis firm TeleGeography.
Other industries would also benefit from the opportunity for route diversity, Cinia said.
Nearly all subsea cables that connect Asia and Europe go through Egypt, but that path is also a common route for shipping, which is the second most common cause of cable failures, said Paul Gabla, chief sales and marketing officer at Alcatel Submarine Networks. The most common cause is fishing activity, he said. The Arctic offers minimal shipping traffic or fishing activity, and in the winter, the ice sheet would protect it from human-caused damage, he said.
‘Tough to access’
The same ice also limits construction. While climate change has made the Arctic warmer and rainier, work on an Arctic cable could only be completed during summer months when the ice sheet dissipates, Mr. Gabla said.
Maintenance presents another issue. Today’s cable ships aren’t designed to break through ice, says Mr. Gabla, and the company is still discussing whether it will be possible to reinforce ships to operate in that environment.
AJ Knaapila, president and chief executive of Finnish telecommunications, cybersecurity and software company Cinia Oy, holds a map detailing submarine cable routes worldwide.
Photo:
Isabelle Bousquette / The Wall Street Journal
It makes potential customers of the cable nervous. Takahiro Sumimoto, senior vice president of marine cable for NTT Ltd., a London-based IT and infrastructure company owned by Japanese holding company Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp., said that if the cable breaks during the winter months, users might have to wait months for it to come back online.
“You can guess that it’s tough to access there. And are you able to pick up the cable from the seabed? If it’s frozen, you can’t.” he said.
Too much customer hesitation could bring the project to a halt. Cinia, Arteria and Far North Digital are wooing other telecommunications carriers, global data center operators such as
Alphabet Inc.’s
Google and
Microsoft Corp.
, and research and education networks to meet their goal.
So far, the joint venture has published one signed letter of intent from NORDUnet, a collaboration of the National Research and Education Networks of the five Nordic countries: Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Sweden and Finland. NORDUnet has said it would use one fiber pair—between 6.25% and 8.3% of the total cable system’s capacity. Some carriers, including
Verizon Communications Inc.,
Orange SA and NTT say they would be interested in evaluating the system once it is built, but there is a hesitation about jumping in early.
Funding challenges
Other trans-Arctic projects have failed or stalled because of funding challenges.
Canadian startup Arctic Fibre planned to have an Arctic cable stretching from Tokyo to London operational by 2015. That didn’t happen, and Arctic Fibre was acquired by Quintillion Subsea Operations LLC in 2016. Quintillion hoped to continue the trans-Arctic cable project, but in 2018, the company’s former CEO was arrested for forging documentation that claimed the company had received funding it hadn’t for building out cable.
A pier in Utqiagvik, Alaska, contends with ice in October.
Photo:
Isabelle Bousquette / The Wall Street Journal
Quintillion said the company’s board hired a new leadership team that has been working closely with community partners to regain trust and rebuild the company’s reputation. “We are committed to do the right things in the right way: on time, on budget, and honoring our word,” Quintillion said.
To be sure, some cable has been laid within the Arctic.
In 2017, Quintillion finished laying fiber around the coast of Alaska, gifting Utqiagvik and other towns with a level of connectivity rarely seen in communities so far north and obviating some of the need for its satellite antenna field. Quintillion said it still plans to extend its cable east to Europe and west to Asia, but said the timeline for doing so is still being determined.
The Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard in 2004 gained a short cable connecting it to Norway’s mainland, enabled by investments from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration and the Norwegian Space Center that required use of a high-latitude satellite station there. The cable gave them an efficient way of getting the satellite data that was downlinked to antennas in Svalbard.
Russian state company Morsvyazsputnik said it has made progress on a cable that would travel from Murmansk at the northwestern end of Russia to Vladivostok on the southeastern end. Morsvyazsputnik said a 1,230-kilometer section of cable from Teriberka, Murmansk Region, to Amderma, Nenets Autonomous Area, has been laid as of October 2022. The total planned route will be 12,650 kilometers and is on track to reach completion in 2026, Morsvyazsputnik said.
Rising tensions
Now, rising tensions between Russia and the West could add an increased urgency to Cinia’s ongoing project.
“We want to strengthen trans-Atlantic cooperation between the U.S., Canada and Europe, and this is one concrete project with concrete mutual benefit,” said Finnish Minister of Transport and Communications Timo Harakka. “Obviously to have this secure, resilient data infrastructure between these countries is even more important than ever.”
Mr. Harakka said he has been stressing the benefits of the Cinia-led effort to the European Commission in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year.
For Cinia’s Mr. Knaapila, the main challenge rests with finding investors ready to buy into the benefits of running submarine fiber-optic cable over the top of the world.
“If you would have asked 30 years ago people how many mobile phones they need,” he said, “everybody would have guessed wrong. If you don’t have something, very few people really can have the imagination to understand the need.”
—This reporting was conducted as part of a Pulitzer traveling fellowship from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Write to Isabelle Bousquette at [email protected]
Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
UTQIAGVIK , Alaska—Nestled between the whalebone-marked graves of long-dead whaling captains, an arctic fox den and a snow-covered beach, a series of satellite dishes point at the horizon from this northern Alaskan town.
Far from the superfast fiber-optic cables that provide internet connectivity to other parts of the world, Arctic towns like Utqiagvik have typically relied on more limited, less reliable satellite connections. It means that students can rarely stream educational videos, hospitals spend hours uploading medical scans and scientists sometimes struggle to simply open emails.
more on connecting the arcitc
The Arctic is one of the world’s last digital frontiers. Subsea fiber-optic cables, which carry over 99% of intercontinental voice and data traffic, have traversed most of the world’s oceans, but so far not the Arctic Ocean, historically limited by the region’s ice sheet.
As that ice sheet has started melting due to climate change, telecommunications companies have looked to the area—where Asia, Europe and North America are closer than they are at any other point on Earth—for a shorter, potentially more efficient route for data flows across the three continents.
“Climate change is even making it technically all the time easier,” said AJ Knaapila, president and chief executive of Finnish telecommunications, cybersecurity and software company Cinia Oy, which, along with partners, hopes to build a submarine fiber-optic cable through the Arctic in coming years, a project estimated to cost roughly $1.2 billion.
An Arctic route would offer the shortest connection between London and Tokyo, carrying implications for industries like financial trading, where milliseconds can make the difference between profits and losses. It would also bring much-needed connectivity to rural northern towns like Utqiagvik, formerly Barrow, transforming one of the least digital regions to a major digital crossroads. Additionally, it could offer geopolitical advantages to whoever controls the flow of information, in a region where tensions are high between Russia and the West.
But what has looked so compelling on a map has been difficult to construct in reality. For more than two decades, Arctic cable routes have been planned, scrapped and delayed, in part due to the challenges of funding a first-of-its-kind project in the icy, hostile environment. Now firms tackling the next generation of Arctic projects are again facing questions about whether the prospect could ever become reality—or whether the Arctic will remain what it always has been: unconnected.
‘You look at a map and you see a need’
Cinia in the past year and a half formed a joint venture with
Arteria Networks Corp.
of Japan and Alaska’s Far North Digital LLC on the project. The current estimate for the length of the cable stands at around 16,880 kilometers, or about 10,500 miles, although the final length could vary, according to Alcatel Submarine Networks, the
Nokia Corp.
subsidiary contracted by the joint venture to lay the cable.
“This is an essential piece of infrastructure,” said Far North President Ethan Berkowitz. “To me, it’s a question of: You look at a map and you see a need.”
The planned far north fiber-optic route will contain between 12 and 16 fiber pairs, with each pair having a capacity of 15 terabits per second.
Photo:
Cinia Oy
With a route survey beginning this year, the cable system is scheduled to be operational in 2026. But when asked about the likelihood of that timeline being met, a Cinia official expressed uncertainty.
“If you ask four of us, you will get four different answers,” said Taneli Vuorinen, Cinia’s executive vice president of Global Connectivity.
Cinia, which is owned 77.5% by the Finnish government, is already a veteran of one failed effort. In 2019, Cinia partnered with Russian company MegaFon on an earlier project designed to route cable east from Europe over the Russian Arctic to Asia. It fell apart in 2021 after the Russian government’s support of the project started to fade and the geopolitical risks of operating a data flow so close to Russia felt too high, Cinia said.
The company packed up its research and partnered with Arteria and Far North Digital on the new cable project, going west from Europe, through the Northwest Passage in Canada, over Alaska and landing in Japan.
The new cable must earn more than $80 million annually during its roughly 25-year lifespan to be profitable, Cinia said.
The partners are self-funding the project with revenue from other areas of their business, while they search for funding from outside investors and future customers. Before survey work can begin later this year, the companies say they need to sell about half the capacity.
The potential for low-latency communications is one of its biggest selling points, according to Mr. Knaapila. A bank in London transmitting data to Tokyo could do so 30% to 40% faster via an Arctic route than through existing subsea routes—a roughly 35-millisecond advantage one way—according to Tim Stronge, analyst at subsea cable analysis firm TeleGeography.
Other industries would also benefit from the opportunity for route diversity, Cinia said.
Nearly all subsea cables that connect Asia and Europe go through Egypt, but that path is also a common route for shipping, which is the second most common cause of cable failures, said Paul Gabla, chief sales and marketing officer at Alcatel Submarine Networks. The most common cause is fishing activity, he said. The Arctic offers minimal shipping traffic or fishing activity, and in the winter, the ice sheet would protect it from human-caused damage, he said.
‘Tough to access’
The same ice also limits construction. While climate change has made the Arctic warmer and rainier, work on an Arctic cable could only be completed during summer months when the ice sheet dissipates, Mr. Gabla said.
Maintenance presents another issue. Today’s cable ships aren’t designed to break through ice, says Mr. Gabla, and the company is still discussing whether it will be possible to reinforce ships to operate in that environment.
AJ Knaapila, president and chief executive of Finnish telecommunications, cybersecurity and software company Cinia Oy, holds a map detailing submarine cable routes worldwide.
Photo:
Isabelle Bousquette / The Wall Street Journal
It makes potential customers of the cable nervous. Takahiro Sumimoto, senior vice president of marine cable for NTT Ltd., a London-based IT and infrastructure company owned by Japanese holding company Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp., said that if the cable breaks during the winter months, users might have to wait months for it to come back online.
“You can guess that it’s tough to access there. And are you able to pick up the cable from the seabed? If it’s frozen, you can’t.” he said.
Too much customer hesitation could bring the project to a halt. Cinia, Arteria and Far North Digital are wooing other telecommunications carriers, global data center operators such as
Alphabet Inc.’s
Google and
Microsoft Corp.
, and research and education networks to meet their goal.
So far, the joint venture has published one signed letter of intent from NORDUnet, a collaboration of the National Research and Education Networks of the five Nordic countries: Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Sweden and Finland. NORDUnet has said it would use one fiber pair—between 6.25% and 8.3% of the total cable system’s capacity. Some carriers, including
Verizon Communications Inc.,
Orange SA and NTT say they would be interested in evaluating the system once it is built, but there is a hesitation about jumping in early.
Funding challenges
Other trans-Arctic projects have failed or stalled because of funding challenges.
Canadian startup Arctic Fibre planned to have an Arctic cable stretching from Tokyo to London operational by 2015. That didn’t happen, and Arctic Fibre was acquired by Quintillion Subsea Operations LLC in 2016. Quintillion hoped to continue the trans-Arctic cable project, but in 2018, the company’s former CEO was arrested for forging documentation that claimed the company had received funding it hadn’t for building out cable.
A pier in Utqiagvik, Alaska, contends with ice in October.
Photo:
Isabelle Bousquette / The Wall Street Journal
Quintillion said the company’s board hired a new leadership team that has been working closely with community partners to regain trust and rebuild the company’s reputation. “We are committed to do the right things in the right way: on time, on budget, and honoring our word,” Quintillion said.
To be sure, some cable has been laid within the Arctic.
In 2017, Quintillion finished laying fiber around the coast of Alaska, gifting Utqiagvik and other towns with a level of connectivity rarely seen in communities so far north and obviating some of the need for its satellite antenna field. Quintillion said it still plans to extend its cable east to Europe and west to Asia, but said the timeline for doing so is still being determined.
The Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard in 2004 gained a short cable connecting it to Norway’s mainland, enabled by investments from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration and the Norwegian Space Center that required use of a high-latitude satellite station there. The cable gave them an efficient way of getting the satellite data that was downlinked to antennas in Svalbard.
Russian state company Morsvyazsputnik said it has made progress on a cable that would travel from Murmansk at the northwestern end of Russia to Vladivostok on the southeastern end. Morsvyazsputnik said a 1,230-kilometer section of cable from Teriberka, Murmansk Region, to Amderma, Nenets Autonomous Area, has been laid as of October 2022. The total planned route will be 12,650 kilometers and is on track to reach completion in 2026, Morsvyazsputnik said.
Rising tensions
Now, rising tensions between Russia and the West could add an increased urgency to Cinia’s ongoing project.
“We want to strengthen trans-Atlantic cooperation between the U.S., Canada and Europe, and this is one concrete project with concrete mutual benefit,” said Finnish Minister of Transport and Communications Timo Harakka. “Obviously to have this secure, resilient data infrastructure between these countries is even more important than ever.”
Mr. Harakka said he has been stressing the benefits of the Cinia-led effort to the European Commission in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year.
For Cinia’s Mr. Knaapila, the main challenge rests with finding investors ready to buy into the benefits of running submarine fiber-optic cable over the top of the world.
“If you would have asked 30 years ago people how many mobile phones they need,” he said, “everybody would have guessed wrong. If you don’t have something, very few people really can have the imagination to understand the need.”
—This reporting was conducted as part of a Pulitzer traveling fellowship from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Write to Isabelle Bousquette at [email protected]
Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
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