Amid major fears over the safety of subsea cables and reports of deliberate sabotage events Robert Earrey, founder, InterProtect explains as the sector sees a surge in growth, effective  monitoring will be key.

The subsea cable industry is entering a period of rapid expansion at precisely the moment its resilience is coming under unprecedented scrutiny. Driven by growing demand from cloud computing, AI infrastructure, financial services and global connectivity projects, investment in new submarine cable systems continues to accelerate.

At the same time, governments are paying increasing attention to the vulnerability of critical digital infrastructure. Recent proposals by the UK Government to strengthen protections for subsea internet cables amid alleged heightened concerns around Russian activity underline just how strategically important these assets have become.

Subsea fibre-optic systems carry the overwhelming majority of international data traffic. They are the hidden infrastructure underpinning modern economies, yet they remain exposed to a wide range of threats, from fishing activity and anchor drags to seabed movement, offshore construction and geopolitical tensions.

As cable owners deploy increasingly sophisticated monitoring technologies, including Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS), Distributed Temperature Sensing (DTS) and advanced vessel-tracking systems, the industry now has unprecedented visibility into emerging risks.

The question for insurers is straightforward: does more visibility translate into lower risk? The answer is less straightforward –  both yes and no.

Earlier Detection, Lower Losses

From an insurance perspective, one of the greatest benefits of monitoring is not necessarily preventing damage from occurring. Rather, it is enabling operators to identify problems sooner. This is particularly important during the construction phase of a cable project.

One of the most challenging claims scenarios for insurers is discovering damage after an installation campaign has been completed and the cable-laying vessel has left site. At that point, operators may face significant mobilisation costs to bring specialist vessels back to the location, alongside project delays and potentially substantial delay-in-start-up losses.

Monitoring can help identify faults while the vessel is still present, allowing repairs to be undertaken immediately and dramatically reducing the overall cost of a loss. It can also help establish precisely when damage occurred, reducing disputes around responsibility and supporting more efficient claims handling.

In this respect, monitoring technology has the potential to reduce severity of claims – something every insurer wants to encourage.

Understanding the Operational Risk Environment

The value of monitoring becomes more nuanced once a cable enters operation. Will monitoring physically prevent a vessel from dragging an anchor across a cable route tomorrow? Will it stop a trawler crossing a cable corridor? Probably not.

However, that does not mean monitoring lacks value. Modern monitoring systems provide operators with an increasingly detailed picture of the conditions surrounding their assets. They can identify hotspots where fishing activity is increasing, highlight repeated vessel movements across cable routes, detect changing seabed conditions and reveal emerging threats long before they develop into major incidents.

In many ways, monitoring acts like the warning systems found in modern vehicles. A dashboard alert does not fix a mechanical problem, but it gives the driver an opportunity to intervene before a minor issue becomes a major failure. Subsea cable monitoring serves a similar purpose. It creates the opportunity to act before an outage occurs.

The Difference Between Data and Risk Reduction

This distinction is important because data alone does not reduce risk. The real value lies in what operators do with the information they receive. It feels like an obvious point to make, but all too often the data dots are simply not joined up properly and critical insights can be missed.

If monitoring identifies increased fishing activity around a cable route, are steps taken to engage with local fishing communities? If seabed movement exposes a section of cable, is remedial burial considered? If vessels repeatedly cross a route, are operators contacted and encouraged to alter their course? These actions are where monitoring begins to create genuine insurance value.

Increasingly sophisticated DAS systems can now identify acoustic signatures associated with specific vessels, in some cases even when AIS signals are unavailable. This not only improves situational awareness but can also support recovery actions following an incident by helping identify responsible parties.

For insurers, that represents a significant advantage. The ability to detect faults more quickly can also reduce the time and cost associated with locating damage, enabling repair vessels to respond more efficiently and helping minimise business interruption impacts.

Could Greater Transparency Create New Challenges?

As monitoring capabilities improve, some owners have raised an interesting question: could more data actually make insurers nervous? The honest answer is that it could. A report showing dozens of near misses along a cable route is naturally going to attract attention from underwriters. However, it would be a mistake to view this information in isolation.

Every industry experiences near misses. Monitoring simply makes them visible. The key issue is not whether near misses occur. The key issue is how operators respond to them.

An owner who can demonstrate that risks have been identified, assessed and actively managed presents a fundamentally different proposition to one that has no visibility at all. For example, if monitoring reveals repeated fishing activity over a cable route and the owner can demonstrate that a fishing liaison programme has been deployed to engage with those operators, that represents proactive risk management. From an underwriting perspective, that is generally far more valuable than not knowing the risk exists in the first place.

This is where specialist underwriting expertise becomes increasingly important. Insurers must learn to distinguish between meaningful indicators of elevated risk and normal operational activity. Otherwise, there is a danger that valuable intelligence becomes misinterpreted as a reason for concern rather than a tool for resilience.

From Reactive Claims to Proactive Risk Management

Historically, insurance has often relied on analysing losses after they occur. Monitoring technologies offer an opportunity to shift that approach towards proactive risk management.

That does not mean monitoring alone will prevent the next major cable outage. Physical incidents will continue to occur, and no amount of technology can eliminate every source of risk. What monitoring can do is help organisations understand those risks more clearly, respond more effectively and recover more quickly when incidents happen.

As subsea cables face risks from both physical threats, the organisations that can turn data into meaningful action may ultimately secure more resilient networks, stronger insurance outcomes and greater confidence from investors and stakeholders alike.

This capability is likely to become increasingly important as the global subsea cable network continues to expand. Recent analysis from S&P Global Market Intelligence highlights a period of rapid and sustained growth across the sector, driven by cloud computing, AI infrastructure and rising demand for international connectivity. The report notes that operators and hyperscalers are not only adding capacity but also actively diversifying routes, building new landing stations and developing alternative corridors to reduce reliance on traditional chokepoints.

That shift reflects a growing recognition that resilience is becoming just as important as capacity. As new cable systems are deployed and existing networks become ever more critical to the global economy, the consequences of disruption will only increase.

The future of monitoring is about transforming intelligence into resilience. For cable owners, insurers and investors, that may prove one of the most important factors in ensuring the next generation of subsea cable infrastructure is not only connected,  but actively monitored and better protected.