Automating satellite back-up for submarine cable networks

Multi-orbit satcom operations specialist neXat has been selected by the European Space Agency (ESA) to lead CableShield — a €1.5 million project to automate satellite back-up for submarine fibre networks.

Roughly 30% of the world’s tracked submarine cables experience at least one fault every year, and repairs typically take 10 to 20 days to complete. With submarine cables carrying an estimated 99% of intercontinental data traffic, a single fault can leave an entire route offline for weeks. This can disrupt banks, cloud platforms, government networks and other mission-critical services that have no automated fallback in place.

neXat, acting as prime contractor on the new project, will work with satellite operator Telesat and telecoms infrastructure provider Colt Technology Services to design, build and field-demonstrate a system that detects submarine cable interruptions and switches affected traffic to satellite connectivity without manual intervention. In the event of an interruption, the platform will select and allocate the necessary satellite resources by interfacing with pooling and sharing mechanisms, and re-route a controllable, scalable subset of data over the selected satellite capacity.

CableShield ties together three layers of infrastructure through a common orchestration framework, rather than relying on a single vendor’s network, involving detection and decision layers as well as terrestrial and satellite control layers. The three layers communicate through the application programming interfaces (APIs) defined in ESA’s Pooling and Sharing Interface Definitions (PSID) activity. This is a standard set of interfaces that let multi-vendor, multi-orbit satcom systems exchange data, request capacity and manage shared resources as a single, unified system.

neXat contributes its operator-agnostic OSS/BSS platform, which will pool capacity across satellite operators and allocate bandwidth automatically to authorised users once a fault is confirmed. Colt Technology Services contributes its IQ Network, a fibre backbone spanning 40+ countries and 1100+ connected data centres, built on 10 subsea systems and 12 landing stations, together with its Traffic Engineering Agent and SDN-based automation stack for programmable, intent-based routing. Telesat contributes its Lightspeed LEO constellation, designed to deliver fibre-like, low-latency connectivity through onboard-processing satellites and optical inter-satellite links.

CableShield will run over an 18-month development and validation program — from requirements definition through laboratory demonstration to field trials — ahead of a targeted commercial launch of the back-up service in 2028, aligned with the commercial entry into service of Telesat’s Lightspeed constellation. The activity will be carried out and funded under the ESA’s Space Systems for Safety and Security (4S) program.

Image credit: iStock.com/Christoph Burgstedt