The problem of critical data depending on a single path is clear.
“This is clearly a sort of concentration of several cables, which means there is a risk of a bottleneck in certain areas,” said Taneli Vuorinen, executive vice president of Cinia, a company based in Finland which is working on an innovative pan-Arctic cable.
“In order to meet growing demand, there is increasing pressure to find diversity” of routes, he said.
This is exactly what the Far North Fiber project seeks to deliver. The cable, 14,500 kilometers long, will directly connect Europe to Japan, via the Northwest Passage in the Arctic, with landing sites in Japan, the United States (Alaska), Canada, Norway, Finland and Ireland.
This would have been unthinkable just a few years ago, when a thick layer of multi-year ice made navigation impossible.
But the Arctic is warming at a worrying rate due to climate change, nearly four times faster than the rest of the world. Sea ice is shrinking by nearly 13% every decade.
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