Are New Zealand's submarine links safe?
Submarine cables under attack – how vulnerable is New Zealand?
In November two submarine telecommunication cables in the Baltic Sea were damaged. Officials suspect, but have yet to prove, a Chinese ship deliberately dragged its anchor over the BCS East-West Interlink and C-Lion1 fibre-optic cables.
Christmas Day saw damage to an electricity cable between Estonia and Finland. The Finnish electricity grid’s head of operations says sabotage can’t be ruled out. The ship was carrying Russian oil, but sailed under the Cook Islands flag, which brings the issue much closer to home.
This week Swedish authorities seize" a cargo ship suspected of sabotaging a cable running between Sweden and Latvia in the Baltic Sea.
Earlier this month a Chinese ship dragged its anchor cutting a cable connecting Taiwan to the US.
While there’s no hard evidence a campaign is underway, the incidents are a reminder of when Auric Goldfinger told James Bond: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action."
Entering the grey zone
In other words we may have entered an era of what is known as grey zone or hybrid warfare. Western nations remain uncertain about how to respond.
The Finns are preparing criminal charges for their case, otherwise Baltic nations are stepping up navy and coastguard patrols.
Apparently NATO is building a fleet of submarine drones to monitor cables.
Legally difficult
The issue is legally tricky because nations only control the sea bed within 22 kilometres of the coast. Everywhere else ships have free passage and proving they are potentially going to cut cables is near impossible.
There is an international treaty covering submarine cables—but it dates back to 1884.
The Convention for the Protection of Submarine Telegraph Cables makes it illegal to damage undersea cables, but enforcement is limited, particularly in international waters. While modern agreements cover telecommunications infrastructure, the legal framework remains outdated for dealing with deliberate sabotage.
How are we placed?
What about New Zealand? At the moment three cable networks and five physical cables connect us to the world.
- The original Southern Cross network has cables on New Zealand’s east and west coasts running to Australia and the US. There is also the newer Southern Cross Next cable.
- Hawaiki runs a single line from Northland that connects both east and west.
- The Tasman Global Access cable links us to Australia.
There’s also the domestic Aqualink cable. More links are on the way. Chorus is working with Datagrid... which is building a data centre in Southland... on the Tasman Ring Network. It plans to have nodes serving Auckland, New Plymouth, Greymouth and Invercargill along with Sydney and Melbourne.
Cable resilience
Most of the talk about the resilience of New Zealand’s submarine cables centres on natural threats such as seismic or volcanic activity.
The original Southern Cross network was designed with resilience in mind, it’s a figure of eight which means it can operate if a segment is cut. That has happened at least twice in the past, without disruption.
There’s been less talk about deliberate damage or the kind of “accidental damage that just seems to be happening a lot right now”.
Significant redundancy
New Zealand can connect to the world without disruption if any one of the links breaks. There is significant redundancy which means there is still connectivity for ordinary users if two or three are affected, although latency may be affected.
Things may be different for the hyper scale cloud companies operating here, but they are able to adjust their use.
Beyond that we’d be in trouble. There are satellite backup options, but latency is poor and bandwidth is limited. There is not enough capacity to cope with today’s high data traffic level.
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The report says that by 2027 half of the CSPs will have begun to add higher capacity to their networks to cater for these requirements.
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XGS-PON or 10-Gigabit Symmetric Passive Optical Network is the next-generation fibre broadband technology that can deliver 10 Gbps for both uploads and downloads. It is the technology that is already powering the Hyperfibre services offered in New Zealand by Chorus, Enable, Tuatahi First Fibre and Northpower.
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