The problem of critical data relying on only one path is clear.
“It’s clearly a kind of concentration of several cables, which means that there is a risk that areas will bottleneck,” Taneli Vuorinen, the executive vice president at Cinia, a Finland-based company working on an innovative pan-Arctic cable, said.
“In order to meet the increasing demand, there’s an increasing pressure to find diversity” of routes, he said.
The Far North Fiber project is seeking to offer just that. The 14,500 kilometer long cable will directly link Europe to Japan, via the Northwest Passage in the Arctic, with landing sites in Japan, the United States (Alaska), Canada, Norway, Finland and Ireland.
It would have been unthinkable until just a few years ago, when a thick, multiyear layer of ice made navigation impossible.
But the Arctic is warming up at a worrying pace with climate change, nearly four times faster than the rest of the world. Sea ice is shrinking by almost 13 percent every decade.