- Distributed acoustic detection detects disturbances in fiber optic signals to identify underwater threats
- The Mission of ‘Baltic Sentry’ of NATO improves underwater security, but surveillance is still difficult
- The deployment of the Northern Sea of AP sensing highlights the role of safety fiber
Submarine fiber optic cables are a crucial part of the global Internet infrastructure, however, the recent incidents of Baltic Sea have generated concerns about their safety.
According to BBC, there are now efforts to mitigate the risk of sabotage using a decades known as distributed acoustic detection (DAS).
This approach detects disturbances in the fiber optic signals by capturing small reflexes sent along the threads due to the pulses of the light that finds vibrations or temperature changes, which allows the system to identify suspicious activities such as submarine drones, boats that drag anchors or divers near the critical cables.
How fiber optics can “listen” to threats
As with the safety of the network, where companies trust the best routers of small businesses to prevent cyber threats, monitoring of underwater infrastructure solutions is becoming essential to protect global communications.
Lane Burdette, Research Analyst of Telegeography, points out that the number of failures that affect submarine cables every year has remained stable, usually between 1 and 200. “The cables break all the time … The number of cable failures per year has really remained stable in recent years.”
During the tests performed by the detection of AP, the system detected a diver that caressed a cable at sea bottom, while other experiments demonstrated their ability to identify drones and vessels, which potentially provided early warnings of sabotage attempts.
“It stops and only touches the cable slightly, the signal is clearly seen … the acoustic energy that travels through the fiber is basically disturbing our signal. We can measure this disturbance,” says Daniel Gerwig, Global Sales Manager of AP sensing, a German technology company.
Just as companies depend on the best business intelligent business phones for real -time alerts and safety updates, early alert systems for submarine cables can provide critical intelligence to avoid interruptions.
Concerns about the vulnerability of these cables have led NATO to launch “Baltic Sentry”, a mission that uses warships, drones and airplanes to monitor the activity in the region, but since constant surveillance is not always possible, the demand for fiber optic fiber acoustic detection solutions is growing.
“It is good that NATO and the European Union have woken up … The question is how fast it could establish contact with a ship,” said Thorsten Benner, co -founder and director of the Global Institute of Public Policies.
Maintaining safe communications in this environment requires the same level of reliability as the best network switches, ensuring a smooth data flow and a minimal interruption.
Companies such as Optics11 and Vivi Solutions are seeing a greater interest in their monitoring technology, which can be implemented in military submarines or along key submarine infrastructure routes.
The AP Sensing system is already in use in northern sea parts, but technology has limitations, which requires signal question points to regular intervals along the cable and has a detection range of only a few hundred meters, which means that it can detect close threats, but it is not a complete security solution by itself.
