The Polar Express is heading east

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The construction of the Murmansk-Vladivostok underwater fiber-optic communication line, dubbed the "Polar Express", began on August 6, 2021, from the village of canada telegram Teriberka on the coast of the Barents Sea. Two cable-laying vessels belonging to the project's lead contractor, the Advanced Technologies Management (UPT) group of companies, began laying the first section - from Teriberka to the village of Amderma in the Nenets Autonomous Okrug. A week earlier, UPT opened a plant for the production of underwater fiber-optic cable in Murmansk.

In addition to the Polar Express, there is the Severnoye Siyanie (Northern Lights) FOCL project, initiated by the St. Petersburg-based Supertel OJSC, which calls itself the only Russian manufacturer of underwater amplifiers for communication lines. According to Konstantin Lukin, General Director of Supertel OJSC, Rosatom took this infrastructure into account in the draft concept of a transarctic communication operator.

When asked about the need to build two parallel underwater trunk lines, the head of Supertel responded that in telecommunications, a reserve is needed in any direction - either on a different route or on different equipment.

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The Arctic couldn't handle three fiber-optic communication lines
The third project in chronology of its appearance to lay an underwater fiber-optic line from Europe to Asia along the bottom of the Russian Arctic seas, the Polar Express, was the first in terms of launch dates and, apparently, the only one. At the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), the agreement on participation in it was signed by Rosatom State Corporation. The international project Arctic Connect, which until recently seemed to be the favorite in the race, has been frozen: a week before Rosatom entered the Polar Express, the Russian participant in the Arctic Connect cable system, MegaFon, decided to review the structure and economics of the project. Another Arctic cable project, the Northern Lights, will apparently seek opportunities to merge with the Polar Express: since last year, its initiators have been trying to attract Rosatom as a state partner.

At the same time, there are many satellite projects for the development of communications in the Arctic region, but most of them exist only on paper. For example, the history of the Express-RV group in a highly elliptical orbit, now part of the Roscosmos Sfera program, is in its 18th year. On October 16, 2007, the Ministry of Information Technologies and Communications issued order No. 116 "On approval of the list of measures for the renewal and development of civil satellite communications and broadcasting systems for state purposes." It prescribed the launch of three Express-RV satellites in 2009-2010, but the deadlines were repeatedly postponed.

Head of the Department for Design, Development and System Integration of Ground Communication Complexes at JSC Information Satellite Systems named after M.F. Reshetnev (JSC Reshetnev) Roman Kurguzov said that the first Express-RV satellite will be launched into orbit in 2026, and the entire Express-RV constellation will be completed in 2027. "We are working on two devices at once, because they are launched almost one after the other," Roman Kurguzov explained. "By the end of 2026, with the launch of the first two satellites, all the functions of the Express-RV system will begin to manifest themselves." He specified that the throughput of each Express-RV spacecraft will be 820 Mbit/s.

Of all the telecommunications satellite projects announced in Russia, the CEO of JSC Center Severnaya Korona Andrey Gritsenko classified two as "of the highest degree of necessity": Express-RV and Marathon IoT (for Internet of Things services). Last year, it became known that Roscosmos ordered only 132 Marathon IoT spacecraft from Reshetnev, while the full orbital group in the project includes 264 satellites.

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