neXat, Telesat and Colt to Develop Automated Satellite Backup for Submarine Cable Networks
neXat has said that it has been selected to lead a €1.5 million ESA-funded project to develop CableShield, a system designed to automatically reroute critical traffic over satellite networks when submarine fibre cables are disrupted.
The 18-month project brings together neXat, Telesat and Colt Technology Services Belgium. Rather than relying on a single satellite provider, CableShield will use a multi-orbit pooling and sharing architecture that can identify a cable failure, allocate available satellite capacity and redirect prioritised traffic without manual intervention.
neXat will provide the multi-orbit OSS/BSS orchestration platform, while Colt will contribute its terrestrial fibre network and SDN-based traffic-management capabilities. Telesat Lightspeed is expected to become the first satellite network integrated with CableShield, providing LEO capacity through satellites incorporating onboard processing and optical inter-satellite links. Lightspeed is currently targeted to enter commercial service in Q1 2028.
A key technical element is the use of APIs developed through ESA's Pooling and Sharing Interface Definitions (PSID) activity. These interfaces are intended to allow otherwise separate terrestrial and satellite systems to request capacity, exchange operational information and manage resources through a common framework. In practice, this could allow CableShield to select satellite resources dynamically according to availability and the requirements of affected traffic.
The project addresses a growing focus on communications resilience as submarine cables remain central to international data transport but can take days or weeks to repair following faults. Satellite capacity cannot necessarily replace the full bandwidth of a major fibre route, so CableShield instead proposes rerouting a scalable, prioritised subset of traffic, such as government, financial, cloud or other critical communications.
CableShield is scheduled to progress from requirements and laboratory testing to field demonstrations, with a commercial service targeted for 2028. The project is being funded through ESA's ARTES Space Systems for Safety and Security programme and is significant for the broader satellite industry because it treats multi-orbit capacity as an automatically orchestrated resilience layer for terrestrial networks, rather than as a separate connectivity service.