The Svalbard Undersea Cable System consists of two 1400 km long submarine communications cables from Harstad on the Norwegian mainland to Svalbard. It is owned by the Norwegian government and Kongsberg Gruppen ASA through the company Norsk Romsenter Eiendom, and operated by Telenor and officially opened 1 February 2004.
Its capacity is used by such customers as NASA, the ESA, several meteorology services, UNIS, and many others. Specifically, the cable carries the following traffic:
- All telecommunication, TV and radio services from Norway to Svalbard.
- Data from 30+ circumpolar satellites via the SvalSat station in Longyearbyen.
- Research and geodetic data from the Ny-Ålesund research community.
- Astronomical data from the EISCAT earth station in Adventdalen.
It was built 2003 by Tyco Telecommunications (Morristown, New Jersey, USA) for the Norwegian Space Centre.The marine installation work was undertaken by Global Marine Systems Ltd (Chelmsford, UK) under subcontract. The earth/ground station on Svalbard is a key site for collecting remote sensing data from polar orbiting satellites, such as those from NOAA, due to its close proximity to the north pole (many of these satellites are polar orbiters; i.e. follow an orbit which almost crosses over the pole). It is operated as an extension of the main Norwegian ground station in Tromsø (the Tromsø Satellite Station, see Swedish Institute of Space Physics).
Read more about Svalbard Undersea Cable System: Technology
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