Reykjavík Grapevine - mar. 2023, Blaðsíða 9

9The Reykjavík
Grapevine 2/23
Best before:
March 2, 2023
Wait.
Really?
OK, 99.999%.
“We have been operating now for
the past 14 years with two modern
submarine cables that have been
providing all the internet connectivity
between Iceland and the rest of the
world,” explains Þorvarður Sveinsson,
CEO of Farice.
Farice is the company tasked with
operating the expansive submarine
cables that connect the beaches of
Iceland with network hubs in Scot-
land, Denmark and Ireland and the
vast expanse of terrestrial networks
beyond that spread like mycelium
throughout mainland Europe.
Owned in its entirety by the Icelan-
dic government, Farice was founded
around its first submarine cable,
FARICE-1, which became operational
in the summer of 2003 to provide
Iceland with international connec-
tivity that could meet the country’s
modern needs. Before FARICE-1
coming online, Iceland’s international
connectivity was dependent on a
combination of the by-then-outdated
CANTAT-3 submarine cable and
limited satellite connectivity.
“I would say that was kind of a
first generation of the internet, with
limited bandwidth,” Þorvarður says of
connectivity before FARICE-1. “But we
can see around 2000 when the inter-
net was starting to really grow and
the capacity need was really growing,
those older technologies could just
not support the capacity needs. That’s
why we talk about the ‘modern cable’,
the ‘modern communications cable’ —
and the FARICE-1 cable was the first
one of its type.”
As Þorvarður explains, Farice’s
cables are far more than passive
infrastructure. “It’s not just fibres, it’s
actually a system, because we have to
have amplifiers every 100 km or so to
amplify the signal.”
To get technical, FARICE-1 has
two fibre pairs, with five TeraBits
Per Second (Tbps) capacity each, for
a total of 10 Tbps. DANICE, which
connects Iceland to Denmark, has four
fibre pairs with a total 40 Tbps capac-
ity, and IRIS (when it comes online
sometime in the first quarter of 2023
to connect Iceland to Ireland) will
transmit 120 to 132 Tbps over its six
fibre pairs.
By comparison, the CANTAT-3
cable that Iceland relied on before
FARICE-1 came online transmitted 3 x
2.5 gigabits per second between North
America and Europe, with a branch
hooking up Iceland with that sweet,
sweet early-90s bandwidth.
“The main point that touches
everyone in Iceland is if the cables
all go down, it’s going to be like
1990-something,” says Guðmundur
Jóhannsson, communications officer
at telecommunications company
Síminn. “We’re going back to the
beginning of the Brit-pop era — that’s
the fact of the matter. We’re going that
far back in terms of what we could do
with technology.”
The brief,
in brief
It’s a possibility that key players at
Iceland’s telecommunications provid-
ers have been briefed on. Around the
same time that pipelines were ruptur-
ing in the Baltic, Farice was inform-
ing Iceland’s network providers of
increased submarine activity around
the areas where they’re monitor-
ing the cables, according to a person
working in the field and speaking with
the Grapevine on the condition of
anonymity.
It’s a briefing both Guðmundur at
Síminn and Benedikt Ragnarsson,
Nova’s chief of technology and innova-
tion, acknowledge, though they appear
to have polar approaches to address-
ing the hypothetical situation of the
cables going bust.
“It's pretty much the situation that
you see,” Benedikt says,
matter of factly when
asked whether there’s a
plan B. “I’m not going to
sugar coat it and claim
there's a plan in place.”
Nova’s
approach, as Benedikt
explains it, appears to lean
heavily on the nation's
unofficial but ubiquitous
þetta reddast motto.
“There is always an action
plan and it lies within the adaptability
of the people,” he says, underscoring
the resourcefulness of the populace as
a whole. “When something happens,
you improvise. Larger nations want
to have everything planned and pre-
planned. We here in Iceland have the
luxury of doing things differently.”
Guðmundur, on the other hand,
explains that Síminn does have plans
and processes in place for a number of
hypothetical scenarios Iceland’s telecom-
munications infrastructure might face.
“We do exercises so if something
happens we know what to do, and
we do it. It’s just part of our security
culture that we do exercises that are
mimicking exactly what we are talking
about (a submarine cable outage) or,
say, mimicking the power going out all
from Akureyri to Reykjavik. It’s just to
be ready when something happens.”
“You always have to prepare for
the worst,” he continues. “We play a
certain part in Iceland as a telecom-
munications company, we take that
seriously and that’s something we
have to be ready for — though we hope
we never have to activate that plan!”
Not a new concern
Though a heavy reliance on global
internet connectivity is a development
of the past 20 years or so, targeting
submarine cables in times of global
conflict is a trend with a much longer
history.
The USS Zafiro was tasked with
finding and severing submarine
communications cables off the coast
of the Philippines during the Spanish-
American war in 1898. Britain cut
a handful of German underwater
communications cables and tapped
the rerouted traffic for intelligence
during World War One. Cord cutting
was employed again as a tactic during
the Second World War.
Even the most recent fear circulat-
ing around the security of global
submarine telecommunications
cables — the very concern Iceland’s
providers have recently been briefed
on — isn’t brand new. The New York
Times was reporting in Oct. 2015 that,
“Russian submarines and spy ships
are aggressively operating near the
vital undersea cables that carry almost
all global Internet communications.”
And the Associated Press questioned
in 2018 what the Russians were doing
loitering around choke points of the
cables that are responsible for global
communication and over which US
$10 trillion in daily financial transac-
tions travel.
One Russian vessel named in both
those instances, the Yantar, was
making headlines again in late 2021,
when it was spending time off the
coast of Ireland. Dublin, of course,
is one of the world’s biggest hubs for
data centres — as Iceland aspires to
be. The Russian Navy ship is equipped
with a hangar to launch submers-
ible drones that can dive to a depth
of 6,000 metres. Those drones have
mechanical arms to operate on seabed
infrastructure, while the Yantar itself
is equipped with sonar to map the
seafloor.
A nation
without an army
While the United States and other
NATO members seem to be system-
atically monitoring the movements
of Russian ships and submersibles
around submarine infrastructure,
Iceland famously does not have a mili-
tary. So what is Alþingi doing?
We turned to Minister for Foreign
Affairs Þórdís Kolbrún Reykfjörd
Gylfadóttir for information on how
the government is responding to
the the state of international affairs
in the wake of Russia’s invasion of
Ukraine and the plans the govern-
ment is putting in place to prepare for
the worst case scenario of Iceland’s
submarine infrastructure being
tampered with.
“Of course there are plans for such
a scenario and such plans are always
under review and internal scrutiny,”
the ministry told the Grapevine in a
statement. “All countries in our region
are concerned about the security of
underwater infrastructure. Iceland,
like most other NATO countries, is
developing contingency plans, seek-
ing alternative connections while
stepping up information sharing and
cooperation with allies in the region to
increase situational awareness.”
What those “alternative connec-
tions” might be, the Minister didn’t
specify, but the consensus from those
we spoke with in the industry is that
they are few and extremely limited
in capacity. Moreover, restoring
the connection in the event of all of
Iceland’s modern cables going offline
could take weeks to months.
“We have never seen what we
call a ‘wet section fault;’ a fault in
the system in the ocean,” Þorvarður
reminds me — an impressive statistic
and something Farice attributes
to its focus on preparation and its
strong relationship with the nation’s
fisheries. “And that’s quite important,
because if we have a fault in the ocean
and it’s in the middle of winter, it can
take months until the weather is good
enough for us to be able to fix it. We
might have to call in special vessels
with special equipment to take the
cable up and fix it.”
In the meantime, Iceland’s connec-
tivity to the outside world would
be relegated to satellites. Only, as
Guðmundur explains, satellites are
an expensive commodity and Iceland
doesn’t actually own any. “So we
would have to rent access to existing
satellites and that’s expensive, but the
main thing is that it’s also slow and
the latency is really high.”
“But because the bandwidth is
limited on satellites,” Guðmundur
continues, “it would mean that prob-
ably the government would step in and
say that they would have to prioritise
the traffic for the government, for
the central bank, for other critical
institutions, so that we can run the
community here. So we would use
the bandwidth for critical infrastruc-
ture instead of us being able to go to
YouTube.”
North Korea
of the North
The difference between connectivity
in Europe or North America in the
event of some mass submarine cable
outage and connectivity in Iceland in
the same instance comes down to the
terrestrial connections. While many
aspects of the global markets would
grind to a halt were inter-continental
connectivity to be severed, life could
go on fairly close to normal for the
average person in the United States
or Canada, since a massive number
of the digital services and websites
they’re accessing daily are hosted on
the continent. The same can be said
for mainland Europe’s connectivity
to the wealth of services and websites
hosted there.
In Iceland, however, an unprece-
dented outage of the submarine cables
would effectively turn this island
nation into a hermit state as far as the
internet is concerned.
“All the Icelandic servers that are
located in Iceland could communicate
and send traffic between each other,”
Guðmundur explains. “So we could
have a small microcosm of an Icelan-
dic internet. It sounds like some kind
of dystopian North Korean internet
and it’s not something anybody wants,
but maybe that could be some kind of
small thing that everybody could do,
so that you could get the news, you
could do some banking.”
It should be noted, though, that the
banking you could do would amount
to checking your balance — unless you
bank with Íslandsbanki, which hosts
its website in Dublin — and possibly
withdraw cash. All credit card clearing
houses are hosted outside of Iceland,
so your plastic would be worthless.
While the government is not
forthcoming about what they can or
are doing to prepare for the — again,
highly unlikely — event of Iceland
losing connectivity with the broader
world, migrating data back to Iceland
is something that local companies can
do to ensure connectivity with domes-
tic users in a worst case scenario.
It’s been in vogue, in recent years,
for Icelandic companies to host their
data in the cloud or at data centres
abroad, just as a number of big name
international firms conduct a great
deal of their high-performance
computing at data centres based in
Iceland. If more and more Icelandic
services and businesses ensure they’re
hosting their data in Iceland, the
better that worst-case scenario dysto-
pian internet would be. As it currently
stands, an Iceland-centric internet
would let those connected browse just
shy of 3,500 sites hosted domestically.
One thing that would work as
normal is voice services within
Iceland. So you would be able to call
your bestie to cry over what you’re not
watching on Netflix, or lament that
you had to get up to turn off the lights
because Alexa is AWOL.
“Voice services would be completely
normal because it’s not dependent on
satellites or the sea cables in any way.
It’s all local,” Guðmundur says. “All
the terrestrial fibres and the 5G should
just be working normally.”
“That’s maybe a contingency plan
for the government to act on or have
in place, so people can go to RÚV or
MBL and visit Heilsuvera, and all that
kind of stuff — those critical things
that just involve getting information
to people so they can at least keep
their lives as normal as possible.”
But hey, you’ll always have
Grapevine.is.
“SO WE COULD HAVE A
SMALL MICROCOSM OF AN
ICELANDIC INTERNET... SOME
KIND OF DYSTOPIAN NORTH
KOREAN INTERNET”
“IT’S NOT JUST FIBRE, IT’S A SYSTEM, WE
HAVE TO HAVE AMPLIFIERS EVERY 100 KM.”

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