Europe’s agenda for undersea internet cables

https://www.euractiv.com/section/digital/news/behind-europes-agenda-for-undersea-internet-cables/

by walterbell • 3 years ago

131 67 3 years ago

I wondered if traffic between the UK and Europe ran through the Channel Tunnel - which would be much harder to surreptitiously cut without being noticed and yes 80% of traffic does:

Approximately 80 percent of the Internet traffic which runs between the UK and mainland Europe today travels through the Channel Tunnel

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/colt-completes-th...

sph• 3 years ago

Props to that article for finding the gloomiest picture of the English station of the Eurotunnel. Brexit has been hard but it's not a nuclear winter just yet.

danielbln• 3 years ago

That looks like it's straight out of Children Of Men. I guess a picture from St. Pancras wouldn't quite have the same punch.

cjrp• 3 years ago

To be fair, the Folkestone terminal is quite... functional.

odiroot• 3 years ago

England is very into that retro-Soviet palette.

jacobp100• 3 years ago

Yeah there’s a 1GW cable that runs through it for power transmission too

moffkalast2• 3 years ago

Darn it, it's just short by 0.21GW.

DisjointedHunt• 3 years ago

Important to note that the EU Commissioner for the Internal Market is an ex Telecom executive by the name of Thierry Breton who has demonstrated willingness in the past for aggressive regulation to help the telecom companies.

As a recent example, he has advocated levying fees on "Over The Top" services, ie Netflix etc that goes into a fund to pay for the Telecom companies investment into infrastructure.

lock-the-spock• 3 years ago

Yes, but the Commission takes decision as a body of 27, not by individual Commissioners. What he might say and what the commission puts forward is different .

Not to mention that the commission in all important matters only makes proposals which are then depending on the topic adopted either by the council (ministers or heads of state of all 27 EU countries) or by council and Parliament.

hcks• 3 years ago

What does "Over The Top" even mean, why can’t Telecom companies finance themselves, etc

dboreham• 3 years ago

OTT refers to the service being delivered via L3 IP, hence the ISP/Telcom can't block it or charge for it (as they would prefer to in the intests of making more money). So the content is flying "over the top" of their gate.

(Telcos didn't want the internet to exist, with its service neutral model : they wanted to sell "value added" services over their wires).

pipo2343• 3 years ago

On one hand, I don't think levying OTT fees make much as telcos ought to have been already paid for the bandwidth.

On the other, I also think OTT companies, and in particular VOD companies like Netflix really have no reason to rely on undersea cables in the first place. Simply put: neither netflix, nor any of their customers are located underwater and 99% of their offering is static content. Which means that distribution necessarily relies on CDNs and it's in everyone's interest (Netflix, the telcos and the customer) to access the copy located nearest to the viewer.

So in principle, content should never be delivered to customers using undersea cables and indeed this typically happens only when people use a VPN (to bypass somewhat silly IP licensing restrictions designed by the content owners).

toast0• 3 years ago

Netflix needs underseas cables (well, transoceanic links) to serve the critical dynamic content / account state keeping and also to transfer content to CDN nodes. The catalog of content changes regularly.

bombolo2• 3 years ago

Another proposal for which the EU would have available funding is the Far North Fiber, an internet cable to connect Scandinavia to Japan via the Arctic to avoid major choke points like the Suez Chanel and the South China Sea, revealed by EURACTIV last October.

But why?

awestroke2• 3 years ago

To avoid major choke points like the Suez Chanel and the South China Sea.

For example:

https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Business-Spotlight/Asia-s-i...

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/submarine-internet-cables-eg...

bombolo2• 3 years ago

Is there really so much communication between europe and japan?

yuppiepuppie• 3 years ago

I cant help but think that any solution will have its vulnerabilities. Therefore redundancy and resiliency in the system design is the best approach.

Bad actors are going act bad no matter which way you go.

londons_explore3• 3 years ago

There are two risks: evesdropping and an enemy cutting your fiber.

Evesdropping should be protected against by encrypting everything. Have a device sampling traffic over the link and publishing anything found in cleartext. Embarrass users into encrypting their stuff. Then, on top of that, do point to point encryption of the data stream (which is super cheap to do - in fact nearly all high speed links do data 'whitening', which is encryption with a well known key - just encrypt with a secret key instead).

Resistance against the enemy cutting the fiber should just be to have lots of connectivity. Hard to cut 50 links all at once.

andy_ppp2• 3 years ago

If cables are cut you can bet the US will retaliate which is why it hasn’t happened. You can also bet there are plenty of undocumented cables.

However I do wonder if we should just focus of getting space laser communications working to avoid some of these ground infrastructure issues, it seems much easier to cut wires than blow up space craft.

atoav• 3 years ago

You can only retaliate if you can attribute the attack first and that might not be possible 100% of the time.

The reason why this happened yet is because it isn't very benefitial for the effort it would take. Any rouge state actor can use the Internet in their enemy territory for far more impacting operations (e.g. propaganda, psy ops).

Terrorism would be a more realistic thing, but terrorists don't typically have submarines.

cycomanic2• 3 years ago

You'll not be able to get anywhere near the throughputs that we have with today's fibre communication networks using satellite communications, unless there is some revolutionary breakthrough (and by revolutionary I mean completely changing of how we understand losses in free-space, so extremely unlikely).

This means we will not really use satellite comms instead of fibre. That said there is definitely applications that benefit from optical satellite comms.

moffkalast2• 3 years ago

focus of getting space laser communications

Maybe there's a company in Israel that can help with that. ;)

awestroke2• 3 years ago

The US will retaliate if somebody cuts a cable belonging to the EU?

I'd be less surprised if the US were the ones doing the cutting

roenxi• 3 years ago

If cables are cut you can bet the US will retaliate which is why it hasn’t happened.

What, like Nordstream? The risk is that the US cuts the cable when it benefits them. It is still a risk. Ditto for who is it who is going to be using the cables to spy on people.

ur-whale• 3 years ago

If cables are cut you can bet the US will retaliate

Unless it's the US doing the cutting, of course.

willvarfar• 3 years ago

It is claimed that cables are routinely cut and the US and Europe do not take obvious diplomatic nor military action.

This was explored as a major topic in the Scandinavian TV investigation https://www.svtplay.se/uppdrag-granskning-skuggkriget

darkclouds• 3 years ago

HP were were working with the british military on laser line of sight communication. If someone breaks the laser beam, you'll know about it. Certainly more secure than cables, but environment is a weak spot, smog, fog, leaves, etc etc.

rcarr• 3 years ago

I might be wrong, but I think with space there’s the potential for a Gravity (2013) style situation though, where if one satellite is blown up the debris could cause a chain reaction and take out a ton of other satellites?

pipo2343• 3 years ago

I'd categorize fiber cutting under attacks on business continuity. So do other forms of denial of service attacks, like interfering with power supply. Yes, the easiest way to protect commodity infrastructure is redundancy. And while an instant total blackout is unlikely, continuous strikes are a problem (compare to electricity networks in Ukraine). Redundancy is costly, especially for long cables, where attack surface compounds into the costs.

Eavesdropping is an attack on business safety. So is injecting misinformation or altering messages. For data, encryption (and authentication!) mostly solves these issues at pretty low costs and I think that where this matters it is mostly covered.

nonameiguess• 3 years ago

You can point-to-point encrypt a single fiber segment at the physical layer. This is what classified networks do and why they're able to use the same public backbones as the Internet, even though most of the traffic is probably also TLS packets to begin with. This way, even the addressing metadata is encrypted.

BSEdlMMldESB• 3 years ago

Embarrass users into encrypting their stuff.

so, utilize fear of humiliation to coerce people into doing what you think they should be doing?

your methods are wrong even if your goal is well intended, I would bet against you because wrong methods have unintended side effects.

BlueTemplar2• 3 years ago

And who is going to do that ? The countries where cables are landing and who benefit the most from that eavesdropping, like the UK (in partnership with the US) and France ??

amelius3• 3 years ago

Resistance against the enemy cutting the fiber should just be to have lots of connectivity. Hard to cut 50 links all at once.

What if they put explosive devices on those links, then detonated them at once?

rasz2• 3 years ago

Why bother with explosives when you are the one manufacturing/assembling amplifiers? https://www.newsweek.com/chinese-parts-found-us-fighter-show...

amelius3• 3 years ago

Perhaps EU should reclaim the Mediterranean sea and the Baltic sea and turn it into land (perhaps also part of the North sea between UK and EU). That would prevent Russian subs from messing with any cables AND it would protect against flooding due to climate change.

ImHereToVote• 3 years ago

Has there been any evidence of Russian subs messing with undersea internet cables?

ceejayoz• 3 years ago

Evidence? Not that's been publicly released, at least. Suspicion? Yes.

They have the subs to do it: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/9928/russias-massive-a...

and there've been suspicious cuts: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/43828/undersea-cable-c...

It's undoubtedly something they'd (and all the other major powers) plan to do in a wartime scenario.

Chris20482• 3 years ago

i.e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantropa

Would piss of a lot of coastal landowners that one, across multiple countries. I'm sure the admin would be horrible.

BlueTemplar2• 3 years ago

Wow, I'm sure nothing would go wrong when that Gibraltar dam would inevitably break ! (/s)

matricaria• 3 years ago

https://www.submarinecablemap.com/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33110478

m4jor• 3 years ago

NSA & CIA: We will tap those

drsw• 3 years ago

The bit rate is somewhat atrocious at the moment, but I really like the idea that we might one day be able to transmit data straight through the planet using neutrino beams https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221679699_Demonstra...

Europe’s agenda for undersea internet cables

Related Stories