The following are the outputs of the captioning taken during an IGF intervention. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> HENDRICK IKE: Hello, good morning, everybody. Thank you for making it here so early on the first slot of this being the second day officially of the IGF '23. My name is Hendrik Ike. I'm a public affairs officer at GÉANT, which is the Regional Research and Education Network of Europe.
Before I introduce the speakers I'd like to talk about why we're here today. Global cooperation in the field of submarine cables is an essential element for both internet governance and diplomacy. Research and educational activity is fueling demands to support investments in submarine systems in remote areas as well as more traditional routes. The changing profile of the ownership/utilisation of the internet is noted in the public interest role of research and education can be seen to be significant enough to be a conduit to ensure a retention of an open, resilient, and distributed internet structure. Submarine cable agreements between National/Regional Research and Education Network, or NREN/RRENs, are based on the common values of trust and reciprocity. They allow public entities to not just disseminate public research and educational data but innovate solutions and services that bolster scientific advancement. With this, of course, comes both economic growth and drivers of sustainability. Submarine cables can also provide physical geopolitical solutions to an increasingly politicized internet for the good of research and education.
I'd like to now introduce the speakers we have today for you. The first ‑‑ and this will be in order of appearance. The first is my colleague Paul Rouse. He's the Chief Community Relations Officer at GÉANT. Following that, we have our friends and colleagues from WIDE, starting with Jun Murai, Founder of the WIDE Project, professor at Keio University, and Father of the Japanese Internet.
We then have Keiko Okawa, a professor at the Keio University Graduate School of Media Design. She's a Director of the School on Internet Asia Project launched by the WIDE Project in 2001.
Then we have Dr. Masafumi Oe‑san, a Vice Director of the IT Security Office at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan.
And our final speaker will be Ieva Muraškiené, a Strategy and Policy Officer at NORDUNet, the Regional Network for the Scandinavian NRENs.
The backdrop of this session is we wanted to view it a bit through the lens of the EU/Japan strategic partnership, and also within that agreement between the EU and Japan there are provisions for agreements on submarine cables.
And in order to understand this in its scientific, economic, and political impact, we'll start with GÉANT, giving a brief overview of how we came to this space.
With that, I'd like to hand over to Paul for this first 20 minutes.
>> PAUL ROUSE: Thank you, Hendrik, and good morning to everybody there and to all those online.
Can you see and hear me okay? Okay. Good. Thank you.
Right. We'll start then with the first slide. And really, I'd like to start off with an introduction here to talk about how we have the outcome of the combination of submarine cables, the internet, and Research and Education Networks. So we'll start today with a little lesson in history, first of all. And let's look at the concept of the submarine cable.
It was in the mid 19th century when the first Trans‑Atlantic cable was put into service, started off with not a very successful beginning, but by 1988 the world saw the advent of fibre‑optic cables in place across the North Atlantic, as well, and this really became the start of the capabilities as we know today, to the point of 98‑99% of all the world's internet traffic is actually carried by submarine cables. There to the right you can see an extract of all the submarine cables that are in service around the world. So really very much a critical infrastructure for modern society.
Let's overlay that next then with how the internet came about.
It was Vint Cerf, back at Stanford University. The importance of this story here, you'll see a lot of internet was borne out of research in academia. So at Stanford University the Internet Protocol was devised. And then later on, at CERN, Tim Berners‑Lee came up with the concept of the World Wide Web.
Many might have heard of the Maslow's hierarchy of needs, where at the lowest level humans recognize the need for simple things like food, warmth, shelter. Some bright individual reproposed this Maslow's hierarchy of needs and suggested that WiFi is the most important characteristic in modern society.
It just goes to show from the concepts and ideas in research that the internet now is ingrained in everything we do.
For any of you that have young children, if you go somewhere new, you know the first thing they want to do is find out the code for the WiFi.
What's the significance of research and the use of the internet? Here, this image, you can see the ATLAS Experiment at CERN in Geneva. The purpose of CERN is high‑energy physics, and they look for new, exciting research into how the world was created. Most recently, there's an exciting new particle identified, the Higgs boson particle. When the scientists there work on these activities, the experiment is conducted there, but the data is disseminated throughout the world for scientists to collaborate globally to investigate those datasets. What you see on the bottom graph on this slide is actually the increase in the profile of traffic.
These scientists generate huge amounts of data when they conduct these experiments. What you'll actually see on the right‑hand side of that graph is where the traffic is now, or the data produced, are flowing out of the network to researchers around the world, is actually starting to peak around a terabyte of data coming out there. So in terms of networking connectivity, that's a pretty significant flow rate in the network, and we need certain network capabilities and solutions to be able to convey and transmit that data accurately.
As well as this, CERN produces rather great impacts on all of our lives. A picture there of an x‑ray. So the technologies that CERN are working with are then deployed and adopted in x‑ray technology that many of us ‑‑ hopefully you won't experience it ‑‑ but if you go into hospital and have an x‑ray taken, some of the technology from CERN may be incorporated into the x‑ray machines that are used to improve the image definition.
So that's physical sciences, but that's not the only place where network connectivity is important.
In the subject of observing the earth, earth, environmental sciences, European Union has a space programme called Copernicus, with different satellites and sensors, and all the sensors take a range of measurements around the earth and make this dataset available for researchers around the world. One such centre in Kenya, the Regional Centre for Mapping of Resources for Development, receives this data that is gathered from the satellites and is transmitted over Research and Education Networks for researchers to help contribute towards the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Looking at land use and crop erosion and crop diseases, all of these sensing technologies are important to help make effective use of land resources.
If you recall back to what I told you about the creation of the internet, roughly at the time the internet was created was also the birth of the National Research and Education Networks.
I would now like to introduce you to the GÉANT organization. Hendrik mentioned it in his introduction, and I'll spend more time here. GÉANT is based in the Netherlands but we're an association with 39 member RREN's behind us, and we support services and activities that support over 10,000 institutions or 50 million academic users. So pretty significant in terms of research and education activity.
And in our composition and our activities, the things that we cover and do, if we look at the next slide, please, Hendrik, is in running that organization we undertake a number of European‑funded projects. But in doing this, we have three dimensions: The network, services, and people.
The network I'll talk about more in just a moment, but the services are also important to exploit that network technology; so identity services, allowing students to access their resources as they move around centres or researchers to collaborate using shared facilities.
Finally, the people dimension ensuring communities of interest can collaborate and work effectively.
And the way the modern world works, this isn't limited just to Europe. We often work on a global basis.
Let's have a little bit of a look at the network now.
The network that you can see there isn't built by GÉANT alone. A characteristic of our community, the National Research and Education Network, or when it's aggregated at a regional level the Regional Research and Education Network, we collaborate together. So Europe will collaborate with North America, with Asia‑Pac, to ensure a network is in place to support those use cases I talked about already. My colleagues will talk to you at greater length about some of the specific activities or initiatives that we see coming up in the future, but at present we have a good infrastructure to ensure this collaboration or this research activity can happen.
We not only support the physical sciences and the earth sciences, but other user communities, as well. Research often relies on technology, artificial intelligence, high‑performance computing infrastructure. Access to those resources are important. Our network provides the connectivity pathways to those. But also the control we have over our network infrastructure ensures we can service the arts and humanities community who are very sensitive to latency characteristics on a network, such that an artist performing a dance routine in Latin American can collaborate with someone in Central Europe who may be playing the accompanied music in a very much controlled latency over the music and image coordination.
Health and food is another area, and also energy. We're working on developing a new site in Cadarache in France where there's a global collaboration to look at fusion energy sources. The data and control of those systems will produce a significant amount of connectivity requirements, and Research and Education Networks are underpinning that.
So I've explained to you a little bit how the internet came to be and how it has its source in research and education and also the significance of submarine cables in that domain. So what have we done about this, as Research and Education Networks, to make sure the network and infrastructure exists there? Well, as an example, RedCLARA, the Regional Research and Education Network in Latin America, with GÉANT and funding from the European Commission, enabled an investment in a new submarine cable connecting Europe to Latin America, that we have dedicated spectrum on this route for the use and benefit of Research and Education Networks.
So this was a real pathfinder example of how Research and Education Networks can be an active player in the submarine cable marketplace.
That's a little bit about the now.
What about the future? Well, why are we here talking today? What's important to us?
If we look to an external advice, that from TeleGeography, a good expert organization and understand all things that are going on about connectivity in large, their data shows that the ownership of these submarine cables is changing. It's changing that what are called content providers, the likes of Google, Microsoft, Facebook, are taking a greater percentage ownership in this submarine cable infrastructure, which means the market is shrinking. So we perhaps have a risk around ensuring that we have adequate capacities that we can continue as RRENs to deliver the research and education mission.
So this is taking our attention, and we are seeing some action in response to this already.
In Europe, on the next slide, there's an initiative called the Digital Data Gateways. Just recently, GÉANT has worked with the European Investment Bank and DG NEAR from the EC to invest in the new MEDUSA submarine cable system in the Mediterranean Sea. This will improve connectivity for a number of North African countries. It's another example where for the benefit of research and education and securing sovereignty over this of infrastructure for the public good, we can have a good mix in the parties and actors to ensure continued outcomes and infrastructure access.
But it's not just the connectivity. As a community, the research element continues. And we are using these same submarine cables in a new project called SUBMERSE to investigate whether it's possible to use submarine cables to be earth‑observing. On the next slide, you'll see an overview of the SUBMERSE project. One slide appears to have missed out there. I just talked about it.
The submarine cable has the ability to not only carry data, that research data that may be produced by CERN, but it has the ability to observe the earth around it, and the oceans are the largest greatest unexplored territory.
So we can see what's happening to the earth from the view of the ocean, which is important for things like climate change and understanding undersea currents. So we're looking at how these submarine cables can also be used for earth observation.
I mentioned earlier when I was talking about the network how we don't ever do this alone. We always ensure we collaborate with partners around the world, and often at a political level we see commitments being made, for example, between Europe and Japan, with a recently signed strategic partnership agreement. And I know Jun will talk to this more shortly and explain how we can translate this political agreement into action in the form of things like digital connectivity and the broader socioeconomic benefits that that brings.
So overall, there's an introduction there. I hope you've understood how the internet has come to be, how the importance of submarine cables are relevant to the internet in carrying that majority of all traffic, and how for research and education it is essential that we can continue to have access to submarine connectivity infrastructure to deliver the benefits for society at large.
Thank you very much for listening. And I hope you enjoy the rest of the session. Thank you, Hendrik.
>> HENDRICK IKE: Thank you, very much, Paul.
And thank you very much for that clear introduction as to why these cables matter essentially for research and education and our community at large.
Before I move on, does anybody have any questions for Paul from the audience or in the chat? Which I see no questions.
We can also ‑‑ we also have a segment at the end where we have time for more audience questions.
But now, I would now like to move on to WIDE, our colleagues in Japan. I see Jun has the microphone already. So I will let him start.
>> JUN MURAI: All right. Thank you very much. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to Kyoto, Japan. And I am Jun Murai. I'm founder of our WIDE project. And I'm going to talk about WIDE. But the Professor Herosha (?) sitting there is director, representative of WIDE project.
But anyway, today I'm going to talk about what the Japan team basically, not only the WIDE project, is talking about. And can I see my slide?
Can you control the slide, please?
Okay. So WIDE project has been a research consortium working for the infrastructure for researchers and internet technology protocols ask other things for a long time. It's been 35 years of history and it's more than 100 companies. More companies are supporting us from Japan, but also they're from the other parts of the world, as well, and universities and engineers, from the ISPs and vendors, engineers. So it's a very nice mixture of professional experts on the network and computation background, including the science and other researchers.
So the WIDE project decided to work on the submarine cable. We've been kind of doing a lot of work. But if you heard of GÉANT and other European activities, and this is very nice that EU is funding the research activities. And then research activity is endorsing the installing of a new submarine cable around. Okay? So U.S. National Science Foundation of the United States is doing a very similar thing and connecting the international cable, including connectivity to Japan and Europe, but also to the South America and others.
So see, the U.S. got their pretty big funding buddy, and then the EU got their pretty big funding buddy, based on the research and the endorsing, installing, the submarine cable.
So the point is that we don't have that in the Asia‑Pacific region. So that has been the issue. So various entities started to work together to work as Europe and America and in the Asia‑Pacific submarine infrastructure for the research and educational activities. That has been discussed.
But finally, now, it's gotten into the form, so the WIDE project started, the thing is called ARENA‑PAC, Arterial Research and Educational Network in the Asia Pacific, also working together with the other funding agencies of Japan and the other partners around the Pacific to work together. And then it's creating the great collaboration to connect the various partners and then onto the very strong ‑‑ tried to establish a strong network infrastructure in the Asia‑Pacific, and then connecting to both Europe and America.
So if you ‑‑ the next slide is going to be this one. Okay. Good.
Okay. So we have a booth out actually, and then we're asking all the people visiting the booth to connect their own Research and Educational Network link by themselves and creating this globe with a pin and a string. And so if you look at this, we do have very important partners. By the way, the blue one, that's the dream line, So it's not there. So the optic fibre is one of the blue lines, and from the Chile to this side, yeah, Chile to ‑‑ we don't have that one yet. We have only in here. After this session, please visit our booth and you can add your dream link for this.
But anyways, that's kind of a symbolic effort we've been working together.
So this part of the Asia‑Pacific is not just by our Regional PAC, which is a WIDE project, but also the Cynet and other things.
Let me share another challenge we started to work on. We are researchers of networking technology, as well. So we have a new technology called a ROADM, reconfigurable add and drop mount click (?) which is a well‑known form of data center technology, as well.
Instead of dropping the fibre and then going forward type of a thing, then we can split the spectrum and dynamically reconfigure the thing. That's a ROADM technology which is getting pretty much standard for the data centre technology. That's called a dry ROADM.
So there's going to be a wet ROADM which is used for undersea cables. That's going to change our configuration and design of the submarine cable for the dropping in the city in from middle of the ocean, and then the reconfigurable for the future.
So remember, the lifetime of the optical fibre is like 25 years. Therefore, during that 25 years, probability a split and the dropping in a certain city, traffic might be changed, and then instead of reinstalling the fibre we can do the reconfigurable utlising the existing fibre and then the controls.
This might be ‑‑ it's not there, the research for the long‑haul network for the submarine cable yet, but we're very eager to explore this new technology for the new cable, especially for between Europe and Japan.
So if the optic fibre coming to Japan from North, which is the red line, and then going to South, which is reaching to Southeast Asia, and then the important thing is that this connectivity for the Northern cable and Southern cable should be a benefit for the European community to reach the Southeast Asia research end as well.
Therefore, the question is how can we ‑‑ I mean, connecting Tokyo and then dropping in the Philippine and other cities, which is also a requirement of EU research community, as well?
So next slide please.
And then those places could be a candidate of installing the wet ROADM and then the reconfigurable for dropping in the Tokyo, dropping in ‑‑ terminating in Tokyo and connecting in Tokyo and then reaching to other Philippine and Southeast Asia. This is what we're trying to achieve for the future.
So this yellow part is basically working with the Japanese government that, you know, which parts are going to be a more missing ocean of the cable? That's going to be beneficial because most of the traffic is on the internet. Internet traffic can be, you know, getting a benefit from alternative and the complicated route and topology. Right? Route and topology should be complicated and redundant for the internet traffic, anyway.
From here on, the application like research and education, not only the scientific big researchers, starting with people capable for explaining about ‑‑ hmm? Oh, okay. All right. I'm sorry. I'm going to talk a little bit more.
This slide is talking about research collaboration between Asia and Europe. Each of the specific subjects, including the fusion and astronomy, High‑Performance Computing, there's a lot of requirements from the research community between the Asia and Europe. And this is from one entity, agency, NII, and the next one is NICT, to work with various entity and the research, and then the third slide is basically they're asking their requirements for how much band width do you want?
And they said 100 gig, 500 gig. Oh, by the way, I forgot to say that most of this string is 100 gig today. And they're going up to a 400 gig for the future. So which is going to be a lot of traffic.
So then the switching to research educational thing, with Keiko, and more consuming a lot of bandwidth for astronomy research.
>> KEIKO OKAWA: Thank you, Jun, for introducing me. So I've been working in Southeast Asia and Japan education and research collaboration for more than 20 years. So we have right now a lot of partners. You can see our red dots, maybe it's a little bit of a blur but red dots are our partners. This is the list from West to East: Nepal, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Timor Leste, Japan, and the most east, Australia.
And those are the partners not only a pinpoint university, but those are the gateways to their own RENs, like an NREN, RREN, so all the countries and regions has their own universities and institutions connecting.
So we are kind of gate‑waying to all the areas.
That red dot, you can see, as you can see, they are connected to each other by international collaboration.
So who are we? The WIDE project launched in 1996 and 2001. 1996 is the Asia Internet Interconnection Initiative.
Remember when we lived with little connectivity in 1996. We had a big hope to connect all the universities. How can we connect the internet among universities in Asia? It was 1995. Only 0.4% of the population of the world was using internet, and even smaller in Asia.
And they connected many universities in Southeast Asia utlising satellite technology.
Five years later, from AIII, we call it, on the right‑hand side, School of Internet, how can we share knowledge among universities in Asia over the internet that AIII connected? That was 2001.
Still only 8.6% of the population was using the internet.
This was the beginning of our collaboration. At that time, all the universities set up the satellites to connect each other and so on and so on.
So connectivity is essential for research and education, even from a very early stage; to 2007 we had a set of partners working together, and that was 20% of the population era.
At that time, learning and research together in Asia has been known since the beginning. So yeah, we got together. We know we can do better with peers than doing ourselves.
So we learned each other. You can see many countries are connecting there. And very, very simple technology at that time, multi‑cast and satellite, and many countries connected by themselves because of the education. And many, many things happened. And then, to 2019, we had almost 60% of the population connected and the university ready to go further, 2019. And then, COVID came. And yes, this is the way we've been working together for several years now, but now we got a cable connectivity, and we have a good harmonization with satellite and cables right now. And ARENA‑PAC, that Jun just talked about, started to strengthen our collaboration beyond Asia. You can see Tokyo is connecting to many places, and Singapore is connecting to many places, and Guam has new technology aided by ARENA‑PAC. But Asia University and our partners are excited by a new high‑speed, network which is in Indonesia (?), 100 giga bps coming to Indonesia, and not only in Indonesia, but beyond that. Indonesia is connecting to Tokyo, but not only Tokyo. It's beyond Tokyo, and it goes into other places, Europe and the United States, as well.
So it's already connected, ready to do many more things. And we are looking forward to more collaboration on the research and education.
And in order to keep this environment sustainable, we really believe education for the internet engineers is key, a key essence for the future. So we have an education programme, and now a whole Asian‑wide partners and Asian‑wide educational programme ongoing and we are ready for research and education beyond Asia. So I would like to pass this microphone.
>> MASAFUMI OE: Thank you very much. I'm Masafumi Oe from National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. Today, I would like to talk to you about how submarine cables can enhance science. So the first thing, why we, the networks, are undersea, the submarine cables, and part of astronomy. This presentation will explain about our big science facilities. This is a very big thing with the data that underwrites the astronomy data. And I will show back to the data and how it impacts the science.
Now, NAOJ, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, we have some of the largest astronomical facilities in the world. Our main facility is located at the top of Mount Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Also, we have a collaboration with the U.S.; and Chile, called the ALMA, the antenna.
So that's two of the current facilities contributing data to observing the astronomy.
So that is one of the examples.
So the Subaru telescope, that has an 8.2 primary single metre facility. This telescope facility is the most populace use. It has a 3‑point mounting point attaching to the technology system. So the Subaru telescope has been established in 1999. The system has been upgraded year‑by‑year. Currently, (?) this is a huge amount of the data to shut to start, so that it is highly sensitive and connected to the computing facility and storage facilities.
So 870 million pixels digital camera in the top of it.
So that's one of our facilities, one of the top facilities, in the world.
The other one is the ALMA project. So this site is also contributing data to transfer to Tokyo and other European countries and the U.S. mainland. So currently, this figure is showing through the submarine cables, but that facility is not quite ready for actual data network from the project submitted by Tokyo.
So the cable branding, submarine cable branding, is not a relationship through the location, or the observation site. However, currently, the observation site is the best facility or location for the observing the stars.
Next part is science is not possible without network technologies. So that ALMA is one of the biggest facilities so you are shown this figure, showing the Yamanote Line. That is a major rail line in the Tokyo area. So each of the parabolic antennae is connected around the sides of the Yamanote Line. So the fibre cable is over 60 meters away from the centre of the data centre.
So each data from the telescope has been transferred to the coordination office. So this office has a super computer system so that this system or facility, the engineering, they analyse the data from each telescope. So then they're creating the images.
So currently, this network is based on the summit (?), however, this facility is depending on the technology of the commodity technology, like Ethernet or something. So this programme will be updated year‑by‑year.
So firstly, so I am talking about the current facilities with data networks. In last year, we are having collaboration with ARENA‑PAC, (?) we reached the Subaru telescope at the top of Mount Mauna Kea, so that we are upgrading our network facility from Mauna Kea to Tokyo.
Before that, we need a few more weeks to analyse the data. However, so after the upgrading the 100 (?) and network deploying, the data arrives to the computing facility in Japan.
So I mean, basically, the Subaru telescope, in 1999, we just have the 180 (?) best network. So all of the computing and analysing and storage facility should be located in the (?) However, currently the high bandwidth network is deployed from Mauna Kea to Tokyo, meaning all of the data is transferred to Tokyo and analysed in the computer facility in Tokyo. That means a lot of access rate to analyse the data, just currently under 10 minutes. That's a very good impact for astronomy science.
So also, the ALMA has currently a data transfer system, a DST, it is upgrading. They will be upgrading to a 1.2 tera bps network which is based on the 400 (?).
I mean, currently, ALMA telescope has a multi‑band receiver, existing on one single antenna. However, if bandwidths are upgraded to 1.2 tera bps, meaning all receivers and sending data is synchronous to the data centre in Santiago. (?) So it also means the fibre is 6 kilometre away from the main site to the centre's facilities.
So this network improvement is to improve the network functionality to open a way for a new scientific frontier. That is a very good impact for the bandwidth.
That all from me. Thank you.
>> HENDRICK IKE: Thank you very much from all three representatives from WIDE.
I would like to open the floor, if there are any questions for our three colleagues here. And I don't see anything in the chat. As I said before, we'll have time at the end for more questions, and I have one or two up my sleeve, too.
But before then, it's my pleasure to introduce my colleague Ieva from NORDUnet who will talk to us about the NORDUnet view of submarine cables. Thank you.
>> IEVA MURASKIENE: Thank you, Hendrik, for the introduction.
So my name is Ieva Muraškiené. I'm sorry for the voice. I come from NORDUnet and if someone introduced me than I have to introduce NORDUnet, as well.
NORDUnet is a collaboration of the Research and Education Networks of the five Nordic countries Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Sweden and Finland. NORDUnet was established in 1985 when the five Nordic countries joined forces. Since then, NORDUnet has been known to pioneer novel solutions and push the boundaries of technology from the beginning of history of the internet itself. First connection between Stockholm and Princeton was set up in 1988 with a capacity of 56 kilobytes per second, and then in 1989 NORDUnet established the first open available internet outside of the U.S.
In 1991, NORDUnet was selected to operate the first route name server, and then after that a lot of other innovative solutions.
Currently, NORDUnet operates a global network that interconnects Research and Education Networks in the five Nordic countries and connects these countries to the rest of the world.
The high level of redundancy on the Nordic networks is ensured by using the shared infrastructure as each NREN in the Nordics provides a spectrum for the NORDUnet network itself. On a global scale, NORDUnet has a presence in both the United States and Asia, as well.
Going further, today, I will talk more about the global communication problems and how we foresee to improve the routes and what value we can bring to the green data centres up in the north and how we can make an impact on the climate science by presenting the smart cables.
Fast and reliable internet is now vital for all parts of our modern society. Being it private use, businesses, governments, research and education institutions. And going forward with a digital transformations we will need the connectivity to be more resilient, more robust, bringing even more capacity to our everyday life.
If we take a look at the statistics and we break down the distribution of internet traffic for the last five years, we can clearly see that the real‑time traffic has grown the most. It's more than three times growth. We cannot afford to have delays in the real‑time traffic. It's not acceptable anymore by any user.
But if we take a look at the example of research and education world, in the north of Europe, an ordinance provides connectivity, high‑speed connectivity, to EISCAT_3D, which is a next generation international atmosphere and geospace research radar. With this high‑speed connectivity, we enable real‑time steering and data integration between three sites of the EISCAT_3D, each consisting of 10,000 antennae beam‑forming phased‑array system.
In Europe, we also have connectivity to large Hadron Collider in CERN, and throughout other Research and Education Networks we have connections also to ALMA Observatory in Chile.
Before many years, scientists had to wait for the dedicated time slots for several years to get access to the equipment on the network, but now the connection needs to be up and running with 100% availability.
You can imagine the pressure of delivering that through the Research and Education Networks.
I don't know if many of you in the audience know what this picture is showing. If not, the answer is it's a methane plume from the Nord Stream gas pipeline explosive in the Baltic Sea.
My point here is you cannot protect the cable on its whole stretch but what you can do is build more redundancies.
Multiple cables can ensure redundancy and resilience for our networks and that's why we need to look at geographical redundancy, meaning we need to look at alternative routes. And while we do that, we must keep geopolitical situation in mind, especially if we consider the Nord Stream case or similar cases which disrupted the submarine cables.
If we take a look again at the statistics and the connectivity today, if we take a projection to the very near future, we would see that we would have doubling of the traffic between Europe and Asia to be expected and almost tripling of the traffic between Europe and North America.
Depending on the perspective we take, it can be a big challenge but it can also present as an opportunity to take action and do something about it.
Now, if we look at the connectivity from the perspective of Europe, we can divide it into four major parts, four major areas. For example, Europe to North America connections, there are a lot of cables connecting Europe to North America through the Atlantic Ocean, but a lot of systems are aging. And we do not know yet if there will be other systems built in time to serve the future needs and demands.
Then we go to EuroAfrica, and Euro South America. The cables go outside the coast of Africa with very little redundancy.
Connecting Asia, we have a terrestrial route going across Russia, and due to a lot of geopolitical implications this route is already more or less getting closed. A lot of contracts are being terminated.
And then it leaves us with the Suez route to the Middle East and Asia.
Now, if we take a really closer look at Suez, currently 90% of the direct traffic between Europe and Asia traverse, it's a very narrow area. It's only 200 meters wide at the most narrow place. You can imagine the congestion of the submarine cable there. It's basically a cable every 20 meters. Over this area, 1,500 trips pass every month. You can imagine there's danger.
And for the challenges that I just mentioned, we can offer one solution. If we take the Earth from the North Pole perspective and look at the route opportunities from the Arctic, we can see we can build the additional redundancy or create complementary routes to the existing Suez Canal area connections by adding submarine cables over the Arctic Ocean. It would be a fast track between Europe and Asia, as it is the shortest possible route. It would strengthen the digital sovereignty of the involved regions. The route also avoids geopolitical considerations as it would go through exclusive economic zones of Norway, Denmark, Canada, U.S., and then traverse Japan. Then you might ask, why are the Nordics involved? The Arctic connectivity would also increase the accessibility of the green data centre industry in the Far North. There we have a lot of local access energy from renewable energy sources, but due to lack of power infrastructure there are limitations of how much energy you can transfer from North to South.
Additionally, there is relatively high cost of transferring energy in large distances. Therefore, moving data is much more efficient and cheaper than moving energy.
In addition to this, where we have really cooler climate in the North, we can utilise the free cooling. We don't need air‑conditioning to cool the data centres. And we can reuse the excessive heat from them to the nearby communities.
And also, if we land high‑speed connectivity in the northern areas, we can create work opportunities and prevent young talent from leaving northern communities from coastal areas of the Nordic countries.
And all of these things combined, we create the Polar Connect Vision 2030. Polar Connect is an initiative led by NORDUnet to obtain secure and resilience connectivity from the Arctic to Asia to North America where we see submarine cables over the Arctic adding digital routes from Europe, they improve the digital resilience and autonomy in the global network.
They can create a ring structure of two or more cables traversing the Arctic Ocean.
Here, in this vision, we see Polar Connect, a more direct route, passing under the icecap of North Pole in the Arctic Ocean just north of Greenland by exclusive economic zones, and then traversing to Asia.
The other one, the yellow one, is Far North Fiber, a route passing through Northwest Passage of Greenland and then to North America through Bering Strait and then to Japan.
Final Fiber Project is more advanced. It's way ahead of us. It's scheduled to be in service in 2027. With the total distance of this submarine cable being 14,500 kilometers, where Polar Connect Project aims to be in service around 2030, with a total distance of 11,000 kilometers.
A lot of questions can be raised from this vision. And one of them, is it doable? And we're working really hard to answer these questions. We're working together with the Swedish Polar Research Secretariat to find a way if this is viable to cross the Arctic Ocean with a submarine cable. And the answer is yes. Their knowledge, they shared the knowledge from the previous Arctic Expedition. It was the Arctic Coring Expedition in 2004 with a drill ship and two ice breakers were used, and they were able to cross the Arctic Ocean and do the expedition.
So in essence, to be able to build the submarine cable over the Arctic we need two ice‑breaker ships and one cable‑laying vessel. With this approach, we can cross the Arctic Ocean and put a submarine cable there.
So while Sweden has one ice breaker, the government is already in discussions about building a second ice breaker of the highest polar class comparable to the Russian one you see here. With the preparations, we see it being ready by 2030.
Additionally, for the submarine cable, we need to have information about the seabed of the ocean. Where Arctic Ocean is largely unexplored territory, especially for intercontinental subsea cables, but it has dramatic benefits for us all, so we must investigate the seabed. So we're working with Professor Martin Jakobsson from the Stockholm University and his project, International Bathymetric Chart of the Arctic Ocean, where the project is helping us to gather the information on what's openly available about the seabed of the Arctic Ocean. The initiative of this project is to develop a digital database that contains all available bathymetric data north of 64 degrees north to be used by map‑makers and researchers and institutions and others who require a detailed and accurate knowledge of the depth and shape of the Arctic seabed, including our submarine cable.
What we see in this image is about 24% of the Arctic seafloor that is already mapped. And we will continue to work with this project to improve this map and fill out the gaps.
We aim that the seabed data will be available and used to identify the potential route of the Arctic connectivity and it will contribute further for us through this project and contribute to the cable survey.
As you can see, Arctic connectivity can bring broader economic benefits for the productivity trade and our all consumer welfare. It will be the shortest route from Europe to East Asia, safe‑guarding the minimal delay time, but also submarine cables can serve as scientific instruments for earth observation, marine, and seismic research.
Traditionally, we have scientists making measurements in the Arctic Ocean by dropping various instruments from ice breakers into the Arctic Ocean. They either take instant measurements or they are left to float and take measurements over time. But there are a lot of challenges. A lot of things can go wrong in the Arctic. Sometimes the instruments are lost and recovered; sometimes never recovered.
This is where fibre sensing comes into play. We can enable submarine fibre cables to be used as senors by equipping them with distributed equipment sensing or state of polarisation technology.
Apart from that, we also are familiar with the smart cable concept where fibre cables can be equipped with various sensors and can act like monitors under the sea. They can measure temperature, pressure, velocity, salinity, and together with the vibrations and acoustic sensors can provide a very wide scope of observations around the cable.
They can also present near real‑time data to be used by scientists and this data can be used to improve forecasting models. It can be used to monitor climate change, ocean heat circulation, and can support us while monitoring for natural disaster warning systems like earthquakes or tsunamis. It can also help us understand marine mammal ecosystems better.
The measurements will be continuous and over a long time and scientists will have access to this data. Also fibre sensing can help us protect and monitor the cables themselves, so a lot of benefits on the scientific angles, which are really important, as this was not possible before.
In addition to that, there's currently a lot of political momentum for the Arctic connectivity as expressed by Margrethe Vestager, the Executive Vice President of A Europe Fit for the Digital Age.
In addition to that, in July there was a Memorandum of Cooperation signed between the European Union and Japan and MOC on submarine cables for secure, resilient, and sustainable global development.
And this MOC states that the Arctic route presents a potential to be expanded to wider European and Asian regions and to the Atlantic and the Pacific areas. And to realize this advantage, MOC expresses a shared intention to explore and facilitate and join respective support action as appropriate on transoceanic submarine cables, such as awareness‑raising, financial supports, demand aggregation, and as appropriate facilitating relevant administrative processes.
This was a joint statement by the President of the European Council, Charles Michel; President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen; and Prime Minister Kishida from Japan, and they met in Brussels and communicated this jointly.
With this positive note on international collaboration on submarine cables, I end my presentation. If you would like to know more, we have a value proposition on submarine cables report done by Copenhagen Economics. And also you can find a lot more information about Polar Connect Initiative under this QR code. Thank you so much.
>> HENDRICK IKE: Thank you so much, Ieva. I had no idea that 90% of European traffic to Asia was at its narrowest point 200 meters wide. That was quite an eye‑opener for me.
Does anyone in the audience have any questions for Ieva? Or any in the chat?
I have some questions of my own, but I should also expand it to all of the speakers here, including Paul online, if anybody had any further questions.
Please. I think that microphone should be working.
>> AUDIENCE: Thanks. I need it because I'm losing my voice. Nothing to do with karaoke.
I did actually have a question for Ieva about the cost of transferring energy versus data that you mentioned. Is there any reports or research you could point to for the figures?
>> IEVA MURASKIENE: There's a lot of research done in that value proposition, in the report. We did investigate that. But it's due to lack of infrastructure or the costs for actually transferring the power. So you can ‑‑ I can share the report with you and we can discuss it.
>> AUDIENCE: Great. Thank you.
>> HENDRICK IKE: Thank you. Any further questions?
Well, then I'll rattle off a few of my own.
I'd like to start online with Paul. He's staying up very late in the UK to be with us here. So I'm very, very happy that he is. Paul, you mentioned in your presentation the BELLA Project and you were a big part in making that happen between GÉANT, RedCLARA, and the EC. I'd just like to know or see your perspective on what would you say was the highest challenge in actually bringing together those stakeholders in an R&E context in order to make BELLA happen?
>> PAUL ROUSE: I think first you had the challenge of it being a pathfinder. In our global community, NREN's haven't had a lot of experience in investing in submarine cables at their inception, the build date. They tend to procure from a more established market.
So working in a new space with different ways of working. And then being a publicly‑funded body comes with certain requirements for compliance, governance, and how the money was spent, and that was sometimes at odds with the way the telecommunications industry works. So trying to find a common way of working that satisfies everybody's obligations was a challenge.
We were carrying out the project as well during some difficult times in the world's economy, with Latin America particularly as well, and Brazil. So ensuring funding was available. There were challenges throughout the project. So I don't think I have one particular one that rises above all the others. But these submarine cable systems are big pieces of heavy engineering, taking lots of resources, complexity to design, construct, and build.
So there are many moving parts. It's not a simple project.
>> HENDRICK IKE: Thank you, Paul.
No, I remember at the time, of course, it wasn't an easy one to get over the line, as such, but it did work and it was a success.
Jun, I liked your slides, and a part of which struck me especially because I'm more from a public affairs policy point of view, which you showed the different political agreements on the different projects between Europe, other countries, and you were showing the multistakeholders of these different areas.
I was wondering, with your experience, what has been, in your view, the more successful projects that have had multiple member states or nations collaborating together? And what do you think were the reasons that made them a success?
>> JUN MURAI: That's a great question. This ‑‑ I mean, 30 years is a long time. So it's always a different funding could be available for creating the future of the kind of fibre networking and other things.
So one time it was a very much kind of a transponder company was exploring the way for outputting the spectrum, so they wanted to work together, and therefore kind of their transponder is, how do we say, in kind, to work together with. Right?
And then also, submarine cable itself is not that particular thing, but the high‑speed equipment, is going to be. So with a vendor, when a vendor started to create the new high‑speed switches from, say, the 10 gig to 100 gig, they really wanted to test that with collaboration and other things. So multiple companies worked with us to explore the testing and other things.
So these are the research network missions of working together.
So that's one of the reasons I intentionally introduced today about the ROADM type of challenges, so that probably the new generation of the optical submarine cable control might be achieved working together with those people, and they want to test that, and we want to test that. And therefore, probably it's a kind of mutual benefit to work together from the point of view of investment to the new technology. It could be very expensive, but then for the testing purpose and other things, then there's kind of a mutual benefit without, you know, actually paying.
So I said "in kind." Right? This is the testing. Therefore, they bring the equipment and they're working together.
So it's a varied, time by time, how that research type of funding could be a benefit for the real operation of creating our network. That's a WIDE project probably characteristic in the world, right? We're always exploring new technologies so that probably the fund‑raising is not that high but we can challenge new things. So that's the model of the WIDE project.
>> HENDRICK IKE: It reminds me if you're working with these actors, talking about in kind, it's very similar to reciprocity, when we make agreements and such.
>> JUN MURAI: By the way, I forgot during my presentation, talking about Southeast Asia connectivity for the researchers, that was initiated by what Keiko mentioned. But I really, we should note that the efforts to connect them is very much the next generation of terrestrial connectivity to Southeast Asia, collaboration with EU, and then now we are working together for the new generation.
I mean, you talk about the Arctic Ocean, or the redesigning the connectivity, as well.
So that's basically the phase one is going to be by satellite. Phase two going to be by TEIN. Phase three we're talking about, those are historical things should be mentioned clearly by me or Keiko. But I apologize.
>> KEIKO OKAWA: TEIN, T‑E‑I‑N, it's the initiative supported by EU to connect ITT/ICT infrastructure between Asia and Europe a long time ago, but now TEIN is phase four. And that strongly supported not only EU to Asia, but Pan‑Asia connectivity, basically Singapore‑centered activity, right?
>> JUN MURAI: It's still there.
>> KEIKO OKAWA: Of course. Still there. Seems a long time ago.
>> HENDRICK IKE: When was the first iteration of TEIN? Do you remember when it began? TEIN is the like GÉANT version. It's like the Regional Network of Southeast Asia.
>> JUN MURAI: That's a question to you, Hendrik, or Paul. Paul knows about the exact year.
>> HENDRICK IKE: In the '80s. Mm‑hmm.
>> JUN MURAI: Yeah, but the cable CAE‑1 started later. Probably middle '90s I believe.
>> HENDRICK IKE: Okay. Thank you very much. It also goes to show that NRENs and Regional Networks were really pioneers at the beginning of the boom of the internet. And I, for one, am honored to have so many colleagues who were there at that point. I would like ‑‑ I saw a few people come in. I'd just like to open the floor for any final questions to our guests. Yes? Microphone here. Okay. Thank you so much.
>> BJORN RONNING: Good morning, everybody. My name is Bjorn Ronning. I'm representing the Norwegian Data Center Community, i.e. the commercial part of my potential problem or project. So my first question is endorsements by governments. The reason for asking is I guess this is going to be an extremely costly project. It's already been mentioned you had to get a new ice breaker just to get this all over there, but that can probably be repurposed to other tasks then, cable deployment and cable maintenance. Obviously, I consider this project to be too much of a heavy lift only for the NRENs. No offense by no means, but you should probably expect to have some governmental funding or you need to have a common Nordic or even European, and also on the liaison side, Japanese, common understanding and agreement on how to fund this project.
Because there also has to be done some financial viability on the return on investments. So how much is one willing to sacrifice for returns on investment, worst case? I don't know if I made myself clear or if I should probably dive into details?
>> HENDRICK IKE: No. I have my own thoughts on it but it's for Jun or Ieva or Paul to answer.
>> JUN MURAI: I think you're right. I was going to explain a little bit more on that part but the Research and the Educational Network contribution for the kind of investment is just a purely 10% or 5% of the actual installation cost, I believe.
But the important thing is, for NORDUnet and myself, from both sides, the cable company, we kind of generated a letter of interest from both sides that once it's installed then we're going to occupy kind of a 5% of the capacity along fibres for the entire research and education community.
So that might be possible. It's not that easy. But the fund‑raising for the research and education are for 5% of the entire cable installation.
And the other part, of course, needs to be kind of investment has to come in from the commercial or the public entity, others in research and educational purposes.
So this is not that easy. So in the past, a number of projects failed because of the lack of the consortium building was not successfully done to raise enough funding.
But so for this one, we kind of did very special approaches different than the past on the other part of the cable, which is ‑‑ which one? The whole EU‑Japan Digital Partnership agreement, which is a very much public entity endorsing, that this is going to be needed for not only for the research and education, science, so on, but for the economy, on both ends.
So that is a way. I don't think the government can raise or support the commercial activities. I don't believe that. But they can endorse. That means the Japanese government, frankly, already started to communicate with economy industries and the financial industries that you're going to get the benefit of this cable, if that is the case. Then you have opportunity to invest for the fibre, because this is special.
So that kind of a promotion already is supported by the government in Japan already.
So this is additional endorsement type of efforts from the public, I mean government side.
So I think this is good. I don't remember this has been done in the history. EU‑Japan Digital Partnership Agreement is now extending the kind of industry and the scope of the people and the stakeholders to be involved for supporting the industry.
So the Research and Education actually initiated that kind of thing. So NORDUnet and myself said, "We want this cable." So we kind of started, therefore, inviting the other stakeholders to be involved. So this is a very special way, I believe. What do you think?
>> IEVA MURASKIENE: Yeah, I agree with everything you said. And from the Nordic's perspective, of course, we need to engage with the Nordic ministries and governments to get their support and endorsement equally, like in Japan.
But apart from the governments we also engage with the European Commission to ensure that there's relevant support from their side to ensure also the funding opportunities that we can explore to have the conversation with them as well.
Because they also made some promises. We also contribute to the goals they are expecting us to deliver on.
And we benefit from the unique position we have from the research and education point. We can talk to them all, and also engage with the commercial side. And that partnership with Japan and having connections to Japan also helps to communicate our message even further, and for them to communicate it back so that both ends of the connectivity are engaged.
And we create these multiple use cases to have the arguments that we really need such infrastructure on our end. It's not just connectivity that we talk about. We talk about much more benefits added on top of simple submarine cable. So that's the progress.
We are also working on de‑risking the project with commercial ties, so to make them a little bit more attracted to the idea. We're working on building the business cases, exploring the opportunities there. It's not just that we talk, but we also do the work, the seabeds, the resources we need for actually building the cable, but to know when they will be available so we can make use of them. So I think there's good progress. Thank you.
>> HENDRICK IKE: Thanks, Ieva.
Paul, did you still want to answer before I move on to the next question?
>> PAUL ROUSE: I think a lot of the good points have been made there. I'll just reinforce a point. We got some experience in doing this now. In the BELLA case study I gave an example, in the Mediterranean with the MEDUSA systems recently. In both those instances it's about a collaboration of partnerships, like Jun and Ieva said. So the question from the floor there is absolutely right. The NREN's alone can't deliver this, whether it's the financial investment, the skills, the expertise, the resources. There's government, there's funding bodies, there's the user communities, the skills we have within NREN's. We explained the history of the internet comes from our community, so we're pretty good at building networks, but the heavy lifting of actually implementing it, the submarine cable, we work closely with partners. And I like to say I think we're quite desirable partners there. Ieva used the term around "de‑risking". With our public funds and our use case supporting research and education, we're a good partner to have on board to enable our project to progress. Thanks, Hendrik.
>> HENDRICK IKE: Thank you very much. I think we have another question from the audience.
>> AUDIENCE: I wonder if part of the story, then, is also security resilience. On one side you have the ability to pump time down this. You have a GPS type of solution there. What is the cost of disaster recovery? If you can predict earthquakes, surely that has a very strong business case. We're working with the likes of Google and British Telecom at the moment on some of these. These companies are looking for new revenue streams and services and products. I think that's part of the story as well.
>> JUN MURAI: Probably that's a little bit different from the maybe, you know, smart cable concept, should be explained from NORDUnet side. But in Japan, we've been (?) The smart cable concept is kind of piggy‑backing on the commercial communication cable, right? That is not enough for Japan. And therefore, the National Library for Earthquake Seismic Study had its own collaboration with a cable company for the specific type of sensors to be installed.
So historically, we started from the, well, expired communication cable and putting the sensor in there for detecting the earthquake or mitigation for the earthquake type of thing. But now, it's very much we now identify this area of the ocean, at the bottom of the ocean is going to be very dangerous. And we have a very specific installation of the sensor cable. So it's its own purposes, as well. It's very serious in this country. Meaning that separate funding, commercial funding, and the research and communication traffic funding, and the seismic funding, there's different funding possible in Japan because of the frequency of the earthquake.
>> HENDRICK IKE: Anyone like to add?
>> IEVA MURASKIENE: Just a little comment. Last week, as NORDUnet, we had a science engagement workshop. We engaged with a scientist and looked at what opportunities they wanted to see on the submarine cables. But there's also an understanding of how different the commercial companies want to use the cable and how different it is for the scientists what they want. They want accuracy. They want a lot of information. So alone, the submarine cable cannot replace other research instruments, but it can contribute highly to early warning or just, "Hey, look, something is happening at that end. Maybe you want to look more closely." That type of information. But not be the main source of seismicity or other types of natural disasters, but we can contribute to the scientific research and bring the information to the table but not be the main source of it. We need to kind of distribute the expectations a little bit.
But it's really insightful to talk to the scientists. They have really good comments. Thank you.
>> HENDRICK IKE: Thank you, Ieva.
Are there any further questions? No? I don't see any in the chat.
Well, I think with that I will close the session. I'd really like to thank everybody who presented today and who attended from remotely across the world and for those of you who turned up for this session this morning. It's been an eye‑opener for me and I very much appreciate everyone's input. Thank you so much.
And enjoy your coffees. Goodbye.
(Applause)
>> JUN MURAI: Audience, please visit our booth after that and you can install your dream to theirs.