Space Norway AS owns the fibre optic cable between Svalbard and mainland Norway. The cable is a key element of Norway’s infrastructure in the Arctic and provides broadband telecom services both to the civil society and the science and space activities at Svalbard. Since Friday, January 7th, 2022, the system has been operating without the full specified redundancy. As of January 18th, 2022, this redundancy is restored.

The Svalbard fibre system is built as a fully redundant solution with two cables separated approximately 5-10 km on the seabed. The redundancy ensures continued operations if one of the two connections fails to function. At 04:10 CET on Friday, January 7th, 2022, one of the two connections experienced a failure. This failure did not in any way change the ability to communicate effectively with Svalbard in the same manner as before, but it represented a temporary lack of redundancy.

The analysis of the failure indicated a shunt failure in the cable causing loss of power to some of the signal repeaters. Through a workaround applying an alternate power supply to the damaged cable, the redundancy was restored during the evening of January 18th, 2022. This minimizes the operating risk until final cable repair can be performed probably in the February 2022 timeframe, depending on the availability of the cable vessel and the necessary weather conditions.

POC at Space Norway: Dag H Stølan, Head of Infrastructure, +4740029601/ dhs@spacenorway.no