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Thank you for your interest in the inaugural Valentia Island Symposium on Subsea Cable Security and Resilience. Held at the historic Cable Station on 10-12 October 2024, the event brought together stakeholders from across government, industry and academia to discuss efforts underway to strengthen the security and resilience of subsea telecommunications cables. A Symposium proceedings report will be posted on the website in the coming period.
Thank you!
The Organising Team
Camino, Leonard, Sandra, John & Nicole
Over 150 years ago, the first successful transatlantic telegraph cable was laid between Foilhammerum Bay, Valentia Island in Ireland and Heart's Content in Newfoundland, Canada, thereby reducing the time to communicate between the Old and New Worlds from weeks to minutes. The technology revolution had begun which had a profound effect on commerce around the globe. It all started here!
Recent geopolitical tensions and the concurrent climate crisis have placed the topic of security and resilience of critical infrastructure at the top of policy, industry and research agendas with increased media attention. This includes subsea telecommunications cables, across which 99% of transoceanic data traffic transits.
Concerns about the security and resilience of subsea cable systems are mounting, notably as a result of greater media coverage. However the topic of cable protection and resilience is not new for the industry, and lessons can be learned from the past, applied to the present, and cables can continue to be protected into the future in an increasingly unpredictable world and unstable ecological context. The Valentia Island Symposium will be the first of its kind to bring together actors straddling multiple policy areas and domains to focus on this topic, and to explore different efforts being undertaken to address them.
About the Symposium
The Valentia Island Subsea Cable Symposium is the first such event to bring together stakeholders from across public and private sectors to discuss the topic of subsea cable security and resilience from a broad range of perspectives. It is hosted by the Valentia Transatlantic Cable Foundation and organized by Irish and international researchers as well as Irish and global industry actors. Its strong emphasis on the connections between past, present, and the future recognizes the rich, yet complicated history of these transmission technologies and the geographies involved, as well as the need to ensure greater understanding of what security and resilience means for the different actors and communities involved in - and affected by - their design, development and deployment.A Call for Presentations (CfP) was issued earlier this year with the aim of attracting innovative and diverse thinking on security and resilience of subsea telecommunications cables. The first afternoon of the Symposium will showcase the selected abstracts and serve as an important segue into the following 2 days of proceedings.
