Source: Radio New Zealand
Starboard’s Mat Brown shows the platform monitoring for subsea cable risks off the UK coast. RNZ / Phil Pennington
An ocean-watching entrepreneur engaged in a trial to assess threats to subsea cables says New Zealand needs to fix its blind spot.
There was “zero” monitoring of the risks even though the cables provided “the lifeblood of our internet, backbones and systems that drive our country”, said chief executive of Starboard Maritime Intelligence, Trent Fulcher.
“We’re hugely reliant on them now, the more that come in we’re going to be even more reliant.
“So, you know, having zero visibility of the risk on top of [that] is a real risk in my view,” Fulcher told RNZ at the opening of Starboard’s new Wellington headquarters on Thursday.
A recently completed trial with the Transport Ministry had found risks from fishing boats getting too close to cables, he said.
“The chances of us getting hit tomorrow with sabotage is probably quite low, but preparing for the future if geopolitical dynamics change is really what we’re talking about.”
Over a million kilometres of subsea data cables power the internet, while lying among them are also gas, power and other pipelines.
Hyperscale datacentre developers like Meta and Google are rolling out thousands of kilometres more of their own cables with ever-larger capacities.
But fears and accusations of sabotage, often aimed at and dismissed by Russia or China, have been growing.
Exploring protection ‘to all critical underwater infrastructure’
The ministry told RNZ some monitoring was done of power and telecommunications cables by Transpower and Southern Cross.
“The ministry is actively exploring how monitoring and protection could be extended to all critical underwater infrastructure across New Zealand,” it said in a short statement on Thursday.
Fulcher said he understood the next step was that a paper would be prepared ahead of government funding to operationalise the monitoring.
The ministry did not provide information to RNZ about that.
Starboard had to also cover off the other half of the equation, Australia, since most local cables land there, Fulcher said.
“So we’re also having conversations with the Australian-equivalent government agencies and those same commercial cable companies about a trans-Tasman protection service.”
Starboard Maritime Intelligence chief executive Trent Fulcher. Sarah Booher
‘We can see you’
Four ministers including the Prime Minister were at the office opening.
Christopher Luxon was briefed on threats to subsea cables and issued a caution about that some months ago.
“Subsea cable protection is really important”, and the firm’s technology could help with that, Luxon told RNZ on Thursday.
The six-year-old Starboard, born with government funding and out of an attempt to set up a space science enterprise in Alexandra that did not quite work out as planned, had just finished the trial with the Ministry of Transport, Fulcher said.
It detected a number of fishing boats trespassing into protection zones around cable landfall.
“We’re able to get on the radio and say, ‘hey, do you know you’re in a cable protection zone?’ And quite often they’re like, ‘no, I’m not. I’m fishing over here.’ We’re like, ‘no, we can see you’”.
‘State-sponsored activity in our waters’
Fulcher said their NZ-built algorithms had become adept at spotting ships “hovering” near cables. Anchor dragging, deliberate or not, is a real threat and has regularly damaged cables in the likes of the Baltic Sea and in waters off Taiwan.
“The main areas that we’ve been looking at and seeing sabotage are in the North Sea and the South China Sea.
“Now, that kind of activity, we don’t see that in New Zealand.
“But what we are seeing is increasingly similar state-sponsored activity in our waters, without naming names.
“So I think some of these state-sponsored actors understand where our assets are.”
Pushed to name names, Fulcher said “sanctioned countries” – Russia, China, “you name it”.
“Now that we understand what that risk looks like, we can be monitoring in New Zealand if that takes place.”
Starboard’s platform is now used in over 30 countries to give a near real-time view from satellites and sensors into software that fuses billions of bits of ship location data daily.
Christopher Luxon talks maritime intelligence with Mat Brown of Starboard. Phil Pennington
“It’s exciting,” said Luxon. “You’ve got a great platform.”
It had been proven against illegal fishing across the Pacific.
Its uses were spreading, which could include “obviously the need for us to protect our undersea cables”, the prime minister said.
Fulcher said the trial had shown there was “100 percent a need” to monitor NZ’s cables, not just the data ones but others.
“We had numerous examples where vessels, mainly fishing vessels, were coming into the cable protection zones, fishing where they weren’t supposed to,” he said.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
