NATO Backs Effort to Save Internet by Rerouting to Space in Event of Subsea Attacks
- Academics eye developing system to reroute data to satellites
- Iceland, Sweden and Viasat among those that could benefit
NATO is helping finance a project aimed at finding ways to keep the internet running should subsea cables shuttling civilian and military communications across European waters come under attack.
Researchers, who include academics from the US, Iceland, Sweden and Switzerland, say they want to develop a way to seamlessly reroute internet traffic from subsea cables to satellite systems in the event of sabotage, or a natural disaster. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s Science for Peace and Security Programme has approved a grant of as much as €400,000 ($433,600) for the $2.5 million project, and research institutions are providing in-kind contributions, documents seen by Bloomberg show.