While consumers are well-acquainted with wireless internet today, the World Wide Web still relies on massive subsea cables that wrap around the planet. Recent initiatives led by SpaceX and Amazon have started to bring internet infrastructure to the final frontier; space.
Now NATO has backed a plan to reroute the internet through space infrastructure if those cables fail.
The Internet is Vital
To understand the context of NATO’s decision, readers should know that the internet is becoming a vital infrastructure requirement for most of the world. Both developed and developing nations are digitizing at a rapid pace, and important services are hosted and deployed through internet connections today.
For consumers, the importance of the internet is best seen in the retail, banking, and entertainment industries. E-commerce and e-banking platforms help people shop and consult financial information.
In entertainment, streaming and iGaming provide digital services that consumers use to, respectively, watch TV or play online games such as roulette. Moreover, through the internet, websites offer a lot of regional variations like European roulette to audiences who might not experience them in their local area. The result is a world that’s more connected than ever before, sharing entertainment and communications nearly instantaneously.
If the internet experiences some kind of failure, millions of people could be inconvenienced or more seriously affected. While local outages can be a nuisance for you, outages in subsea cables can put entire countries offline. Issues with subsea cables are also very expensive to fix or replace, with the average cable restoration taking approximately $2 million each.
The Rise of Satellite Internet
Since 2019, SpaceX’s Starlink has been forging ahead with seemingly endless satellite launches. By the summer of 2024, Starlink has situated more than 6,000 satellites over Earth in what they call a mega-constellation. Those constellations direct internet signals back down at the planet, where they’re caught by Starlink’s sleek, square-shaped radar dishes.
The result is a fast internet that can be accessed virtually anywhere. Rural areas that lack internet infrastructure can achieve much better speeds by using Starlink over the traditional options. While Starlink is the leader of this burgeoning new ISP sector, Amazon has also joined in on the action. The retail-turned-tech giant established Project Kuiper years ago, but they started satellite launches in earnest this year, intending to monetize them in 2025.
NATO’s Satellite Plan
With this context, we find NATO’s plan for a backup internet system. The initiative hasn’t been publicly announced yet, so it doesn’t have a quick, accessible name. What has been reported by Bloomberg, is that it’s a collaborative effort between the US, Sweden, Switzerland, and Iceland. That may sound like a random collection of countries but, Switzerland aside, these are three countries that manage key points in the Atlantic’s subsea cable infrastructure.
NATO has given over $400,000 towards the project, which is costed at $2.5 million. According to this project, the estimated cost of cable failure could exceed $10 trillion. So, in response, researchers want to develop a system that reroutes the internet through available satellites in the event of a damaged cable. The plan was no doubt spurred by recent issues with subsea cables, where large portions of East Africa were left without internet. Off the coast of Côte d’Ivoire, four cables; ACE, WACS, SAT-3, and MainOne, were taken offline by an undersea landslide.
It may seem like a small contribution from the multinational organization, but it reaffirms that NATO is exploring ways to safeguard internet access from predictable and unpredictable disruptions. It also tacitly reveals that, to NATO at least, satellite internet is the way. If consumer-facing services like Starlink and Project Kuiper become dominant, future civilizations may get their internet via the stars instead of the sea.
