Submarine cables account for the majority of the world’s internet traffic, but as concerns over malicious actors moving to cripple or interfere with internet infrastructure increase, the European Union has a number of its own projects underway, underpinned by hidden political dynamics.
Undersea fibre-optic cables facilitate 99% of global internet traffic, according to telecommunications research company TeleGeography, making them a crucial, if unseen, part of our society.
In recent years, the issue of how these networks could be targeted to bring communications and information exchanges to a standstill, and also of eavesdropping, has been central to international tensions between the US and China.
This geopolitical dimension of transcontinental cables inevitably gets intertwined with commercial interests, as deploying internet cables for thousands of kilometres is expensive, and Big Tech companies have increasingly entered the game with their own projects.
In Europe, ensuring the resilience of undersea critical infrastructure is a sensitive topic since the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline last September. European Commissioner Thierry Breton has since pushed a secure connectivity agenda combining a diversification of internet connections and satellite-based communications.
However, how the EU executive has selected and designed such projects has irked some European countries, which want to push their own agendas and companies.
Undersea cable pipeline The Global Gateway, Europe’s strategy for financing international projects in competition with China’s Belt and Road Initiative, earmarked around €30 billion in digital connectivity projects such as submarine and terrestrial fibre-optic cables, space-based secure communication systems and data centres.
The lion’s share of EU funding to third countries is directed to Africa, where currently the main official project for EU-Africa connectivity is Medusa, which connects Southern Europe to Algeria, Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia via the Mediterranean Sea.
According to a presentation the Commission gave to national representatives in April, another project is under consideration: EurAfrica Gateway, which would run from the Iberian Peninsula along the Atlantic coast of Western Africa through the Gulf of Guinea to the Democratic Republic of Congo.