The Last Continent
Antarctica comes in from the cold Could a subsea cable finally be close to connecting the last unconnected continent?
D
espite the recent boom in subsea Internet cables, Antarctica raemains the last unconnected continent. In its long summer, it is home to dozens of research stations hosting thousands of researchers, who generate terabytes of data a day. But the whole continent relies on satellite connectivity which barely qualifies as broadband. Terrestrial subsea cables can now reach up to 300 terabits per second (Tbps) but Antarctica gets less than 30Mbps from its satellite links Even the International Space Station, in Earth orbit, does better than our most southern continent; at 600 megabits-persecond - more than 20 times the bandwidth of the US’ McMurdo research station. But, nearly a decade after it was last considered, 2021 has seen a flurry of interest in finally laying a cable to Antarctica that could revolutionize the way scientists conduct their research. Megabit Internet in the Antarctic Both McMurdo and New Zealand’s Scott Base are on Ross Island, which is 20miles off the Antarctic coast, and the southernmost island in the world, some 4,000 km (2,400 miles) south of Christchurch, New Zealand, Till last year, the Scott Base relied on a 2Mbps satellite connection, but recently upgraded to 10Mbps download / 6Mbps upload from IntelSat with 300ms latency between Scott Base and New Zealand. The US McMurdo station, on the Southern tip of Ross Island, has something closer to 25Mbps to share between up to
Dan Swinhoe News Editor
1,000 people in the Austral summer. “I've seen the Antarctic program evolve from relying on point-to-point HF radio that was used to move data from McMurdo and South Pole stations in the 80s and early ‘90s to modern satellite communications,” Patrick Smith tells DCD. Smith is manager of technology development and polar research support at the National Science Foundation – the US government’s science agency: “We're trying to run a science town that supports all the logistical things it has to do; software updates, exchanging database files, moving cargo between us and logistics centers up north, supporting the scientists and our telephone systems, email, and medical video teleconferencing. “We're doing all this incredible amount of stuff with the amount of bandwidth that's typically available for one household in rural America, and we're starting to hit the practical limits of being able to keep growing and expanding.” He says that even a 100Gbps cable would be “essentially infinite bandwidth” for McMurdo and could relieve a lot of the constraints. Can NFS make a subsea cable? This year the NFS put on a workshop to discuss how a cable would change the lives and research of scientists and staff stations in Antarctica, and is in the process of feasibility study ahead of potentially developing its own cable to the continent. After decades of relying on satellites, the workshop produced a comprehensive report detailing the impacts of how a cable and a huge bandwidth boost could benefit research, logistics & safety, and the personal
"We're doing this incredible amount with the typical bandwidth available for one household in rural America. We're starting to hit the practical limits"
lives of the Antarctic mission. “A combination of new US science experiments requires the US to think differently about their data transfer requirements, and redevelopment of NZ and US Antarctic bases has forced both programs to look to the future and address long-standing connectivity issues,” says Dr. John Cottle, chief scientific advisor to Antarctica New Zealand, the government agency responsible for carrying out New Zealand's activities in Antarctica. “As science, associated technology, and data storage methods progress it’s natural that much greater amounts of data will be collected by scientists and they will want to transfer this data to their home institutions for processing, Financially, a cable begins to make more sense as data volumes rise, and I [also] think there is generally a greater demand and expectation for connectivity in all aspects of life.” Smith says the NSF first looked at the feasibility of a subsea cable from Australasia to Ross Island around 10 years ago, driven partly by the then-proposed Pacific Fibre cable that would have gone from Australia to New Zealand and onto the US. However, PF folded in 2012 and Smith says the NSF let the topic ‘go dormant.’ But two recent developments re-ignited NSF’s attention: Chile’s Humboldt cable is due to connect South America with Asia. Meanwhile, Datagrid is building a 50MW hyperscale facility on New Zealand’s South Island near Invercargill. “The needs and the demand to help support the growth of our science program have shifted the direction towards [a cable]. As the need and desire for digital transformation have grown, we’ve bumped into some limits of what you can do with just regular conventional satellites.” A number of researchers DCD spoke to note the current US administration under President Biden is more likely to favor large science projects with a strong climate component than the previous Trump regime.
Issue 43 • December 2021 / January 2022 53
