In 2022, they will transit 99% of IT exchanges. These are the submarine cables. Today, more than 400 connections exist between the five continents. France alone is one of the major entry points for the European continent. This Monday, October 3, our colleagues from Europe 1 report that the President of the Republic Emmanuel Macron has requested that an inspection of French submarine cables be carried out. A call that owes nothing to chance. Since September 27, the two Nord Stream gas pipelines located in the Baltic Sea have been victims of leaks, caused by sabotage, according to international investigators.
According to our colleagues, the French head of state has demanded that all French cables, through which digital data pass, be checked. This represents, to date, about thirty pipes laid several tens of meters below the surface of the sea. However, such monitoring is almost impossible. Some cables sometimes travel tens of thousands of kilometers. For this, the experts will be able to use safety sensors installed on the cables themselves. Indeed, in normal times, these are intended to amplify the data transported on these mega-cables, at regular intervals. In addition, these sensors can detect any act of sabotage, explains Europe 1.
If these electronic communication axes are located several tens of meters from the surface of the water, Paris is truly worried. However, for the consequences of such acts of sabotage to be visible, at least four to five cables would have to be targeted, simultaneously.
To prepare for such eventualities, the Head of State received a series of recommendations so that data vital to the maintenance of “priority” activities in the country are preserved. Thus, the objective would be to do everything so that the hospital system or the banks continue to operate. For this, Emmanuel Macron could choose to suspend access to streaming platforms like Netflix, Prime Video or even YouTube. And for good reason, according to the American report The Global Internet Phenomena, Netflix consumes 15% of the world’s bandwidth, for YouTube this amounts to more than 11%.
