They want to bypass the US. Canada is putting 6,000 km of underwater cable

A group of companies from Canada and Europe wants to build a 6,000-square-meter building. km underwater telecommunications cable, ensuring direct data transmission bypassing the United States, the French-language public broadcaster Radio-Canada reported on Thursday.

The cable project between Norway and Labrador, Canada, continuing south to Montreal, has been named “Leif Eriksson”from the name of a Viking sailor who reached the coast of Labrador and Newfoundland at the beginning of the 11th century. The fiber optic cable would cost approximately CAD 1 billion. The project's shareholders would also like to build a large data processing center in Canada, in Happy Valley-Goose Bay.

Currently There are over 600 telecommunications cables laid on the seabed in the world. Almost all of them are operated by four private companies, the American SubCom, the French Alcatel Submarine Networks, the Japanese Nippon Electric Company and the Chinese HMN Technologies – the Canadian Asia Pacific Foundation enumerates on its website. Canada has a cable connection across the Atlantic with Great Britain and Ireland, managed by an American-Dutch consortium, and a cable connection with Iceland through Greenland, operated by the Greenland Post. In turn, the transpacific cable belongs entirely to Google, and the interests of private companies “may conflict with national security requirements,” emphasize Asia Pacific Foundation specialists.

Most of these cables run along similar routes, which leads to a dense concentration of installations on the seabed, which poses a threat to specialists, also in the context of recent attacks on such installations, including: in the Baltic Sea or near Taiwan.

In September this year a group of 70 Canadian institutions, experts and well-known figures wrote a letter to Prime Minister Mark Carney regarding Canada's digital sovereignty. It emphasized that currently 90 percent Canadian internet traffic goes through the US.

They want to participate in the “Leif Eriksson” project on the Canadian side BlockLABa Canadian company from the province of Newfoundland and Labradorspecializing in the construction of data infrastructure and blockchain technology, as well as Innu Development Limited Partnershipwhich is an Inuit-owned economic development company. On the Norwegian side, the company wants to be a partner Bulk Infrastructurewhich co-owns a similar cable between Scandinavia and the US state of New Jersey.

For the first time, the project of a fiber-optic cable called “Leif Eriksson” appeared in the fall of 2021. At that time, it was noted that, on the one hand, the installation of the cable would improve the quality of telecommunications in Inuit communities in the north of Canada, and at the same time – it would create the possibility of building data centers in Labrador.

From Toronto Anna Lach (PAP)

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