Much has been written about suspected sabotage of undersea cables in the Baltic Sea, but a UN official said that fishing trawlers are causing the most damage by far, rather than spies.
Western officials have accused Russian vessels of sabotaging undersea communications and power cables in several high-profile incidents in the Baltic Sea in the past few months.
European leaders and experts suspect acts of “hybrid warfare” against Western countries supporting Ukraine, and are calling for increased maritime security.
Photo: AP
“The fact that interest in cable resiliency obviously has increased ... shows the importance of [this] infrastructure that we are so dependent on,” International Telecommunications Union (ITU) Deputy Secretary-General Tomas Lamanauskas said in an interview with Agence France-Presse.
The laying and operation of underwater cables was long the preserve of a consortium of large telecoms operators, but the Internet giants have largely taken over in recent years, as they strive to keep up with ballooning flows of data.
Today, submarine cables form the backbone of global communications, carrying about 99 percent of the world’s Internet traffic, Lamanauskas said, adding that even when traffic goes through satellites, it is bounced to land stations and goes through underwater cables “to reach every corner of the Earth.”
About 1.4 million kilometers of fiberoptic cables are laid on the ocean floor, enabling the provision of essential services such as trade, financial transactions, public services, digital health and education around the world.
Damage to submarine cables is not uncommon.
According to the International Cable Protection Committee (ICPC), there are an average of 150 to 200 outages per year worldwide, or about three incidents a week.
However, while suspected nefarious activities have been in the headlines, Lamanauskas said that fishing and anchoring is responsible for 80 percent of all recorded damage.
There are also natural hazards, aging, abrasions and equipment failures, he added.
Given the growing importance of such cables, “every incident and every cut of the cable is much more noticeable,” he said.
Moreover, while the undersea cable network is vast, there are only about 500 individual cables in the world, meaning that “even when a few of those are cut or ... damaged, the impact” is huge, Lamanauskas said.
That was certainly the case when three submarine cables carrying about a quarter of all Internet traffic between Asia and Europe were cut last year in the Red Sea, or when a huge volcanic eruption severed the cable linking the Tonga archipelago to the rest of the world, he said.
Lamanauskas also highlighted last year’s “important cable cut on the West African coast, [which] really impacted quite a bit of economies” in the region.
It was after that incident that Nigerian Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy Bosun Tijani approached the ITU to figure out “what can we do together on that,” he said.
In a bid to increase cable resilience, the UN is pushing for the international community to increase cooperation in this highly sensitive sector.
The ITU and ICPC have set up a group of specialists tasked with developing solutions, are to meet for the first time on Wednesday and Thursday next week in Nigeria.
Lamanauskas said there were clearly a number of solutions for improving cable security and resilience.
There was a need for better protection of the cables, he said, but also for faster repairs of damaged cables.
More cables should also be laid in isolated areas, allowing data to be more easily redirected in the event of a cut.
Lamanauskas stressed the need for strict “cohabitation rules” to avoid cable cuts by fishing trawlers or other ships that drop anchors on the seabed.
Polish presidential candidates offered different visions of Poland and its relations with Ukraine in a televised debate ahead of next week’s run-off, which remains on a knife-edge. During a head-to-head debate lasting two hours, centrist Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, from Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s governing pro-European coalition, faced the Eurosceptic historian Karol Nawrocki, backed by the right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS). The two candidates, who qualified for the second round after coming in the top two places in the first vote on Sunday last week, clashed over Poland’s relations with Ukraine, EU policy and the track records of their
UNSCHEDULED VISIT: ‘It’s a very bulky new neighbor, but it will soon go away,’ said Johan Helberg of the 135m container ship that run aground near his house A man in Norway awoke early on Thursday to discover a huge container ship had run aground a stone’s throw from his fjord-side house — and he had slept through the commotion. For an as-yet unknown reason, the 135m NCL Salten sailed up onto shore just meters from Johan Helberg’s house in a fjord near Trondheim in central Norway. Helberg only discovered the unexpected visitor when a panicked neighbor who had rung his doorbell repeatedly to no avail gave up and called him on the phone. “The doorbell rang at a time of day when I don’t like to open,” Helberg told television
‘A THREAT’: Guyanese President Irfan Ali called on Venezuela to follow international court rulings over the region, whose border Guyana says was ratified back in 1899 Misael Zapara said he would vote in Venezuela’s first elections yesterday for the territory of Essequibo, despite living more than 100km away from the oil-rich Guyana-administered region. Both countries lay claim to Essequibo, which makes up two-thirds of Guyana’s territory and is home to 125,000 of its 800,000 citizens. Guyana has administered the region for decades. The centuries-old dispute has intensified since ExxonMobil discovered massive offshore oil deposits a decade ago, giving Guyana the largest crude oil reserves per capita in the world. Venezuela would elect a governor, eight National Assembly deputies and regional councilors in a newly created constituency for the 160,000
North Korea has detained another official over last week’s failed launch of a warship, which damaged the naval destroyer, state media reported yesterday. Pyongyang announced “a serious accident” at Wednesday last week’s launch ceremony, which crushed sections of the bottom of the new destroyer. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un called the mishap a “criminal act caused by absolute carelessness.” Ri Hyong-son, vice department director of the Munitions Industry Department of the Party Central Committee, was summoned and detained on Sunday, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported. He was “greatly responsible for the occurrence of the serious accident,” it said. Ri is the fourth person
RSS