ONE OF THE world’s leading communications companies is to travel to Ireland to meet Government, Defence Forces and Garda officials in the coming weeks to discuss what they’re describing as a revolutionary system to protect vulnerable subsea cables.
The Journal spoke to experts from Nokia at a NATO-organised event in Portugal recently who said they had found a new way to monitor for signs of possible attacks on cables off the Irish coast.
A large number of undersea telecommunications cables pass through Irish waters and head out into the Atlantic both to the US and mainland Europe. There are also several gas and electrical lines running into Ireland.
As we have reported previously, it is believed that Russian ships have been mapping the cables off the coast.
NATO General Hans-Werner Wiermann – head of Critical Undersea Infrastructure Co-ordination – said that unusual ship traffic near cables in European and Irish waters has shown the possibility of mapping activities.
The Nord Stream pipeline sabotage case has prompted European and NATO officials to devise a strategy to prevent future attacks.
The recent exercise observed by The Journal was a major military mobilisation held at coastal towns an hour south of Lisbon in which NATO and partner nation navies gathered to test new technology such as undersea and airborne drones and equipment to monitor cables and pipelines.
REPMUS, or Robotic Experimentation and Prototyping with Maritime Unmanned Systems, is a Portuguese-led project that looks at developing new technology, particularly for navies.
A second event, Dynamic Messenger, also takes place in tandem during the event and sees scientists work with military personnel to test new subsea equipment.
Essentially REPMUS is the experimentation with the craft and Dynamic Messenger is about putting that into action in a scenario based assessment. There are also exhibits for companies to meet prospective people.
The exercise has been held in a purpose-built Portuguese naval drone testing base on the beautiful sand beaches of Troia Bay since 2004.
Nearby and around a headland is the coastal resort town of Sesimbra (a continental cross between Tramore and Kinsale, in size and design). Critically, for this exercise, it is the landing point for the undersea cables Atlantis Two and Sat-3/WASC.
There were multiple locations where drone manufacturers, scientists and Portuguese and Spanish naval vessels were carrying out experiments with a dummy subsea cable on the seabed.
In 2014 the NATO Centre for Research and Experimentation (CMRE) joined the REPMUS exercise for the first time and since 2019 NATO experts in unmanned droones have been involved.
Nokia, the Finnish technology company, has been working on new technology that could revolutionise how vulnerable cables and pipelines are monitored.
Undersea cables contain fibre optics – that is they send messages using light. Nokia has come up with an invention that monitors fluctuations in the light travelling down the cables. These fluctuations can be measured to determine if the cable is in trouble not just from saboteurs but also from seismic events.
The sensors, called Distributed Acoustic Sensor, have already been deployed at a number of offshore platforms in Norway.
“These conversations are happening, we are meeting the Irish in October,” a Nokia expert, who did not wish to be identified, said in Portugal.
“We are introducing this technology to them and we are having a variety of people and getting an idea what Ireland needs and then working out what they need.
“We can demonstrate the system to them – get a pre-existing cable and this system can be installed in a matter of days so if they opt for this system we can do it relatively quickly,” they said.
They explained how the system works – using the light travelling down the cable to monitor.
“It is an existing seabed cable, it looks at the deformation of the cable. Light goes down the fibre cable and everytime that cable gets deformed in some way it creates a little mirror and it sends light back.
“We can then work back using various factors where it has happened by seeing where the pressure has built up.
“A lot of information can be divined from the pressure wave,” they explained.
The data then is sent to a command centre which monitors, in real time, these incidents.
The Nokia expert said that given the huge area covered by undersea cables it is impossible to have ships and aircraft monitoring the cables’ entire length.
“This is real time data and they will no longer rely on sonar works and other forms of detection.
“It uses existing infrastructure and you can be flexible with it – it will not provide all the answers but it can be a suite of answers that could make that environment more data rich,” he said.
Nokia declined to give details on the price of the equipment as it is commercially sensitive.
NATO had a large contingent at the event and it was clear in discussions and interviews conducted by The Journal that they were moving ahead with drone technology to protect the cables.
The Irish Naval Service was present at the event but only participated in REPMUS. The team attended as part of the NATO Partnership for Peace initiative which invites partner countries to events.
During the event naval divers worked with other nations on studying the effectiveness of an undersea drone the Irish navy use in search and rescue operations.
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