Summary
- neXat will lead the €1.5 million CableShield project with Telesat and Colt Technology Services Belgium.
- The platform is intended to detect submarine fibre outages and switch affected traffic to satellite capacity automatically.
- Development and field validation will run for 18 months, with a commercial service targeted for 2028.
neXat has been selected by the European Space Agency to lead a €1.5 million project designed to switch communications traffic automatically from damaged submarine fibre routes to satellite networks.
The CableShield project will bring together neXat, satellite operator Telesat, and Colt Technology Services Belgium to design, build, and field-test an automated backup system for subsea connectivity. Development will run for 18 months, with a commercial service targeted for 2028.
The system is intended to detect a submarine cable interruption, decide which traffic requires protection, secure satellite capacity, and redirect that traffic without waiting for a manual intervention. That moves the project beyond simply having satellite connectivity available as a contingency.
CableShield is being developed through the Space Systems for Safety and Security programme within ESA’s Advanced Research in Telecommunications Systems programme. The architecture is intended to coordinate three layers: failure detection and decision-making, terrestrial network control, and satellite network control.
Those systems will communicate through application programming interfaces developed under ESA’s Pooling and Sharing Interface Definitions work. The objective is to allow different terrestrial, satellite, and multi-orbit systems to exchange information and request capacity through a common orchestration layer.
For data centre operators, the relevance is the dependency between physical compute infrastructure and the networks connecting it. Redundant power and cooling cannot preserve service availability if a facility loses the routes required to reach customers, cloud regions, or other sites.
Large facilities normally use diverse fibre routes and carriers to reduce the risk of an individual cable failure, but geographical diversity is not absolute. Subsea systems can still be affected by cable cuts, anchor damage, geological events, deliberate interference, or failures at landing infrastructure. Repair can take significantly longer than switching between terrestrial paths.
Satellite backup does not offer a like-for-like replacement for the capacity carried by modern submarine fibre systems. Latency, available bandwidth, ground infrastructure, traffic prioritisation, and service cost all constrain the volume of traffic that can be transferred. CableShield is therefore aimed at continuity for selected services rather than reproducing an entire damaged cable’s throughput in orbit.
The automation layer is the more significant engineering element. Conventional resilience arrangements often depend on predetermined failover routes or manual coordination among different infrastructure providers. A system that can detect a failure, assess demand, allocate satellite capacity, and make routing changes across separate networks could shorten the time between an outage and restoration of priority services.
The project also reflects increasing attention on Europe’s physical connectivity infrastructure. Data centres may be geographically distributed, but much of the traffic linking European markets to one another and to other regions still converges on a relatively limited number of terrestrial corridors, landing stations, and subsea cable systems.
Telesat’s involvement links the project to its Lightspeed low-Earth-orbit constellation, with CableShield’s proposed 2028 commercial entry timed to align with that network’s service plans. Colt brings terrestrial fibre infrastructure and operational networking experience, while neXat specialises in integrating satellite services across different operators and orbit types.
Field validation will determine whether the three layers can operate as a unified resilience system rather than parallel networks. That includes the less visible operational questions: how a failure is identified reliably, which traffic receives priority, how satellite capacity is reserved, and how connections are returned to fibre after repair.
If the project reaches commercial deployment, it will add another resilience option rather than remove the need for diverse fibre. For critical facilities, the practical value will depend on whether automated satellite failover can preserve the specific applications that cannot tolerate the repair time associated with a serious terrestrial or subsea outage.
