Rostelecom Restores Kamchatka-Sakhalin Cable

Rostelecom, Press Release
August 14, 2026

Rostelecom says it has completed repairs to the Kamchatka-Sakhalin submarine fiber line and restored full telecommunications service on August 14, 2026. The work took place in the Ust-Bolsheretsky district under difficult marine and weather conditions.

The project focused on improving the cable's shore-end route in the shallow coastal waters of the Sea of Okhotsk. Divers exposed the existing cable at depths of up to five meters, roughly one hundred fifty meters from shore, cut it on the seabed and transferred a section to a pontoon. Technicians then spliced in about four hundred meters of new cable installed from land by horizontal directional drilling. Divers subsequently buried the cable in the seabed.

Onshore crews installed and buried another one hundred fifty meters of new cable and added a shore joint. Rostelecom said the revised route follows a safer coastal alignment intended to improve reliability and reduce the risk of future damage. Specialists from BULAT, including divers, supported the preventative work.

Full service has resumed in Kamchatka, parts of Chukotka and Severo-Kurilsk on Sakhalin, with online services operating without speed restrictions. The restoration completes the maintenance window covered in SubTel Forum's earlier report on the <a href="https://subtelforum.com/kamchatka-faces-5-day-internet-outage-for-cable-repairs/">Kamchatka repair outage</a>. Rostelecom launched the nine-hundred-kilometer Sakhalin-Kamchatka line in 2016 to connect the peninsula with the mainland.

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