NATO is living in such hysteria that Russia is waging war against its undersea cables that it’s funding a pilot project for moving some of the internet traffic carried by those cables to satellites. The project is called Hybrid Space/Submarine Architecture Ensuring Information Security of Telecommunications, or HEIST, and the initial test project is due to cost some $2 million, including $400,000 from NATO, reported Business Insider. It is being developed by academics alongside the satellite broadband firms Viasat and SpaceX.
The core idea, BI says, is simple: To use satellites to transmit some data, making the West less reliant on undersea cables. “Our ultimate ambition is to redefine the backbone of the internet,” said Gregory Falco, an engineering professor at Cornell University working on HEIST. “Instead of requiring all of our data to flow through subsea cables (of which 95% of the internet is reliant on) we would like to enable an ecosystem of options,” he said. “While one may argue that submarine communication cables are very efficient, they are not very resilient to natural or human-made threats.”
