ESA Funds Automated Cable Backup Project

Publication Staff, Advanced Television
September 15, 2026

The European Space Agency has selected multi-orbit satellite operations specialist neXat to lead CableShield, a €1.5 million project intended to automate backup connectivity when submarine fiber routes fail. The project brings neXat together with Telesat and Colt Technology Services Belgium. Their demonstration will monitor for cable failures, then transfer selected traffic to satellite links automatically. ESA is funding the work through its Space Systems for Safety and Security initiative within the Advanced Research in Telecommunications Systems program.

CableShield is designed as an orchestration layer across separate communications domains instead of a single-vendor backup network. Its architecture links detection and decision functions with terrestrial-network controls and satellite-network controls. Those layers will communicate through application programming interfaces from ESA's Pooling and Sharing Interface Definitions work, allowing multi-vendor and multi-orbit satellite systems to exchange operational data, request capacity and manage shared resources as one service environment. When a fault occurs, the platform is expected to select available satellite resources and reroute a controllable, scalable portion of affected traffic with defined routing and prioritization.

For submarine cable owners and network operators, the project addresses the difficult interval between a fault and physical restoration. Satellite capacity cannot replace the full throughput of a major fiber system, but automated allocation and traffic prioritization could preserve selected critical services while repair work proceeds. The multi-provider pooling approach also tests whether operators can obtain resilient capacity across satellite fleets without building a separate manual process for every provider. Colt supplies the terrestrial-network perspective, while Telesat brings the satellite-operator role to the field demonstration.

The current award begins an 18-month effort devoted to development and validation, not an immediate commercial deployment. The partners must still integrate the detection, control and traffic-shifting functions and then prove them under field conditions. neXat aims to offer the backup service commercially in 2028, timed to Telesat's planned Lightspeed service entry. The demonstration and its validation results are therefore the next confirmed milestones for determining whether CableShield can progress from an ESA-backed resilience project into an operational continuity option for submarine cable networks.

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