Connecting satellite and land through subsea fibre cables

Space Norway’s subsea fibre-optic cables, the Svalbard Connection, runs from the Norwegian mainland to the Svalbard archipelago.

It connects the Svalbard community in Longyearbyen, and the world’s northernmost ground satellite station, Svalsat, to the mainland through stable and efficient broadband.

This fibre connection is a critical infrastructure vital for health services, aviation, research and national governance on the archipelago.

The Svalbard Connection consists of two parallel fibre-optic cables running along the ocean floor, spanning approximately 1,400 km, which is  roughly the distance between Oslo and Paris.

The cables are buried approximately two metres deep in the sea bed in selected areas to protect them from damage caused by fish trawling and anchoring of ships. The sea depth reaches approximately 1,670 metres just west of Svalbard, where the cables areburied. At the time of their construction, they were the world’s deepest buried subsea fibre optic cables.

In other areas on the cables’ path, the sea depth reaches as much as 2,700 m.