NATO's Project HEIST To Build Backup Satellite Links For Undersea Cables

Recently, we reported about a major Internet disruption in the Baltic Sea that included a cable connecting Finland and Germany and another one that runs between Lithuania and Sweden being cut within 24 hours.

At the time, the cause was not known but deliberate sabotage was suspected.

Add to this the February 2024 incident that saw an attacked ship’s anchor snagging three fiber-optic cables on the Red Sea floor, one that carried around 25% of all the Internet traffic between Europe and Asia.

While the affected areas regained connectivity soon after the incident, albeit at slower speeds, by rerouting and eventually through patch fixes, it raised an important question:

How do we tackle such disruptions?

Sabotage aside, subsea cables are susceptible to breakages due to non-malicious reasons as well.

In fact, each year there are around 100 cable cuts that transpire among the 600 or so undersea cables spread globally.

Spanning a width that matches a garden hose, subsea cables lie on the ocean floor and not buried underneath. Additionally, they’re quite fragile. This means that objects such as anchors, submarines or even ocean critters can end up damaging or snagging cables.

Of course, we are well prepared to fix these problems quickly with the help of specially designed ships stationed around the world as soon as such incidents occur, but the sheer number of incidents means that around 16% of global connections are down yearly.

Yet, these speedy repairs can take days or weeks to be fixed, depending on several factors, as well as generate additional expenditures costing millions of dollars per repair.

Moreover, one of the biggest concerns is the disruption of communication that occurs from such incidents in the Internet era, especially considering the total value of transactions made per day using undersea cables exceeds $10 trillion.

This is what NATO (The North Atlantic Treaty Organization), a military alliance of 32 countries in Europe and North America, is looking to solve with its project HEIST.

NATO’s HEIST

NATO’s Hybrid Space-Submarine Architecture Ensuring Infosec of Telecommunications (Infosec stands for Information Security) AKA HEIST will look to the stars to circumvent any major disruptions by building satellite links that will act as backups to undersea cables.

The organization will implement a system that allows seamless switching between undersea cables and satellite links in the case of such disruptions.

The project comes with two main objectives:
 

1. Identify the precise location of damages on subsea cables to quicken repairs.

2. Increase the number of pathways for data transmission, including diverting high-priority traffic to satellites.

According to Gregory Falco, the NATO Country Director for HEIST and an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Cornell University, “The name of the game when it comes to enabling resilient communication is path diversity.”

Furthermore, Falco feels the move to build more Internet pathways should include “something in the sky rather than [just] what’s on the seabed.”


The project aims to begin testing in 2025 at the Blekinge Institute of Technology (BTH) in Karlskrona, Sweden, where researchers will look to locate damages to undersea cables with 1-meter accuracy.

Nicolò Boschetti, a doctoral student at Cornell, who is working on HEIST, notes the importance by citing the example of Iceland.

“Iceland has a lot of financial services, a lot of cloud computing, and it is connected to Europe and North America by four cables. If those four cables get destroyed or compromised, Iceland is completely isolated from the world.”

However, the satellite plan comes with one hitch—data transmitted through satellites observe considerably slower speeds than fixed cables.

Where Google’s advanced fiber-optic cables are said to achieve speeds of 340 terabits per second and other cables not too far behind, they still outperform the 5 gigabits per second speeds claimed by NASA in the Ku band (12–18 gigahertz).

Here, HEIST plans to use higher bandwidth laser optics systems in their satellite links, which can carry 40x data as compared to radio transmissions. This still falls short of what cables can do. Additionally, laser transmissions can be blocked by smoke, haze, clouds, and the like, while delays in signals can cause further problems.

To find good solutions, Falco says HEIST is “going to make it super-public, and we’re going to want people to poke a lot of holes in it.”

What do you think of NATO’s project HEIST to leverage satellite links to avoid Internet disruptions? Do you think more regions around the world should consider implementing similar measures?

Let us know in the comments below!