A plan to build the world’s first fiber optic cable across the Arctic has secured its first investment, the consortium behind the 1.1 billion-euro ($1.15 billion) project said on Friday.
The submarine cable, which developers say will be the first to be laid on the Arctic seabed, will connect Europe and Japan via North America as part of the global internet infrastructure.
An earlier plan to lay the cable along Russia’s Arctic coast, in partnership with Russia’s second-largest mobile phone operator, Megafon, was canceled last year.
This was due to Russia’s growing reluctance to authorize the laying of the cable in its territorial area, according to the Finnish company Cinia, which leads the Far North Fiber consortium.
Far North Fiber is a joint venture between Cinia, US company Far North Digital and Japan’s Arteria Networks.
“We may have seen other signs of rising nationalism in Russia and that is what we have experienced in the project as well,” Cinia CEO Ari-Jussi Knaapila told Reuters.
The cable, which will run from the Nordic countries to Japan via Greenland, Canada and Alaska, will reduce data transmission delays between Frankfurt and Tokyo by about 30%, it said.
NORDUNet, an operator of pan-Nordic research and education networks, said it has signed a letter of intent with Far North Fiber to invest in one of the planned 12 fiber pairs the cable will contain.
Far North Fiber did not give the value of the investment, but a source said a pair of fibers was worth about €100 million, with another €100 million in maintenance costs required over its 30-year lifespan.
Existing network cables between Europe and Asia run mainly through the Suez Canal, which is vulnerable due to damage from heavy shipping traffic, Knaapila said.
“We all depend more and more on the network and its usefulness depends on how many alternative routes there are.”
Cinia, a Finnish state-majority owned network company, is involved as its mandate is to improve and diversify connectivity in the country, which is now heavily dependent on cables connecting it to the rest of Europe.