Nokia to sell submarine network business to France in $375M deal Nokia is planning to sell off its undersea internet cable business unit to France. The transaction is worth €350 million ($375 million) and will see France initially purchase an 80 percent stake in Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN), with Nokia retaining a 20 percent stake initially to facilitate a smoother transition. The sale …
Submarine network purchased by Frogmen then? Sounds fishy. Doubt they will fathom it all out. Data will flow at a sea-snail's pace - what a croque.
Just needs to be managed by Telecom Italia, and rent the service and repair vessels from OceanGate - you don't want to burst their bubble, but the venture is already Finnished before it sets sail - rather a shame since they are sinking so much into it.
Handy having the resources of the Agencies of the French Government to call on when operating in hostile environments
I suspect this is the other way round. NATO are becoming increasingly worried about defending underwater infrastructure. And there are certainly things you can do. But the problem wiht undersea cables is tha tthey're static, they're huge, and they live in empty places. You just aren't going to be able to protect them all.
So the logical response to that is to have lots of redundancy. Making it harder to take out multiple cables at once. Also seeing as the cable ships are a rare asset, and are mostly in use, you don't have huge spare capacity. So maybe a nationalised company is the answer? It can be run less efficiently, so there's always a bit of repair capacity on hand.
Alternatively, Britain just paid about £60m for a new ship (RFA Proteus) to do underwater infrastructure protection. It's an experiment, so they just bought a North Sea general purpose rig support ship. And are testing it, along with various underwater sensor kit and drones / ROVs. The idea is then to purchase a couple more, or build custom ships if there's some capability they need that they can't buy off the shelf. Given we're also heavily invested in remotely operated minesweeping, and are getting rid of the plastic minesweeper fleet, it's possible that the motherships for the minessweeping role could be dual purpose.
Maybe the French looked at things the other way, and bought themselves a company with some of the capabilities they need, rather than the Royal Navy's option of trying to learn it all in house.
>>Alternatively, Britain just paid about £60m for a new ship (RFA Proteus) to do underwater infrastructure protection.
Many years ago they had one of those. HMS Challenger.
It was technically a ship used for submarine rescue; it often had "interesting" cargo and the DP system it had was second to none.
/mine's the one that looks like a sou'wester and has a 12" tape reel of DP data in its pocket.
HMS Challenger
Somehow, in my memory, didn't seem all that time back. Decommissioned in 1993.
Now, scouring the seabed for diamonds
Decommissioned in 1993
After seven years service.
Ordered under Maggie, commissioned under Maggie, decommissioned under Maggie, because it was apparently "too expensive". The price the government got for the vessel when they sold it to Namco was never disclosed, so we can be confident that it was yet another asset given away by the Tories.
"they're static, they're huge, and they live in empty places. You just aren't going to be able to protect them all. So the logical response to that is to have lots of redundancy. Making it harder to take out multiple cables at once."
I think the regimes who want to attack cable infrastructure have been practicing for a very long time, and any hope NATO or others have of achieving resilence through redundancy is misplaced. There's been several recent incidents where mutiple cables were cut near-concurrently in the Red Sea, another case off the coast of West Africa, off Vietnam, in the Baltic. Historically there's been repeated proximity breakages of multiple cables in 2008, 2011, 2023, 2024 as an easily searched minimum, I suspect there's a good many more where the reporting is suppressed.
In peacetime it's easy enough, in wartime it would be even easier. I'd imagine certain regimes already have VLF-triggered mines that can be placed as required and detonated on command.
Anon,
Actually protecting cables gets easier in wartime. Because if an enemy ship or sub is sniffing round your cables, you can just sink it. Whereas in peacetime you might suspect they're up to no good, but all you can do is observe.
The mines issue is also covered by having underwater protection vessels. In the same way as minesweeping was done during the Cold War. You regularly survey areas of interest (like the entrances to your ports), with accurate sonar surveys - and then you can detect if the enemy have placed mines or listening devices. So the idea is I'd imagine to do regular surveys of undersea cables. It's one thing for the Russians to play silly buggers with cables deniably, it's a bit different if we can find one of their actual mines on one of our cables.
Of course Putin may want to escalate things still further, international law isn't very good at solving bad behaviour it tends to only say what it is. But getting caught risks us escalating. And there's a lot of unpleasant things we could do to screw with Russia, were there the political will.
Also don't knock redundancy. Multiple redundancy with multiple paths of entry for cables and multiple cross-connections so you can route via other country's cable networks make the job of doing major damage much harder. And also make it much more obivous when it happens.
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