The European Space Agency (ESA) has selected its vendors for a new network resilience project.

The ESA has awarded satcom solutions group neXat, operator Telesat, and telecom infrastructure company Colt Technology Services Belgium a €1.5 million ($1.68m) contract to design, build, and demonstrate a detection system for subsea cable interruptions, capable of switching traffic to satellite to avoid service disruption.

CableShield aims to tie together three layers of infrastructure through a common orchestration framework and agreed APIs.

The contract is part of the Advanced Research in Telecommunications Systems (ARTES) 4.0 program, specifically its Space Systems for Safety and Security (4S) program.

“Submarine cables carry an estimated 99 percent of global connectivity, so when they go down, entire regions can lose access instantly, disrupting business, public services, and other critical communications,” said Caroline De Vos, COO of neXat, in a statement. “Satellite provides the lifeline that keeps essential services online when their primary connectivity is gone. Having a dedicated multi-orbit platform like neXat's ensures service providers can access and manage backup connectivity effectively when it is needed the most.”

NeXat will act as prime contractor, providing the new platform, with Telesat set to contribute low-Earth orbit (LEO) satcom capacity as the system’s first capacity provider and Colt offering its IQ Network fiber network, spanning more than 1,100 connected data centers, ten subsea systems, and 12 landing stations, served by its Traffic Engineering Agent solution.

The CableShield contract will span an 18-month development and validation program, moving from a definition of requirements to lab research, before transferring to field trials. Commercial launch targets provision in 2028, aligning with the rollout of Telesat’s Lightspeed service in Q1 2028.

The solution’s backup provision will enlist multiple satellite providers in a “pooling & sharing” mode, using neXat’s OSS/BSS platform to automatically select and allocate satcom resources to reroute data over orbit.

The system will adhere to ESA’s Pooling & Sharing Interface Definitions (PSID) specifications, authenticating operators to carry secure data without it being exposed to unauthorized sources.

ARTES has conventionally been associated with civil and economic objectives, though with the European Commission and ESA’s pivot toward a dual-use direction promoting sovereignty and resilience, the pursuit of subsea cable defense fits the changing narrative in Europe.

Worries concerning the vulnerability of subsea cables to covert sabotage have grown in sobriety in recent years, reaching a certain peak early last year when the China Ship Scientific Research Center and the State Key Laboratory of Deep-Sea Manned Vehicles jointly announced the development of a titanium diamond-grinder system capable of 1,600 revolutions per minute for oceanic salvage and seabed mining at a depth of 4,000 meters (13,123 feet), for use with the country’s Fendouzhe and Haidou submersibles.

Analysts highlighted the system’s capability to sever armored subsea cables too, which can take 10-20 days to repair, leaving banks, cloud networks, and government services in the dark and vulnerable to further sabotage.