From 2027, Finland will no longer maintain the poles of the power lines on which the optical fiber cables are mounted. The system ensures a part of the international internet traffic to Russia.
The Finnish energy company Fingrid has already sent a notification to the Russian telecommunications operators. The cables are to be cut, and the poles – dismantled.
Some voices argue that, after the cessation of electricity exports to Finland in 2022, maintaining these poles solely for telecommunications operators is no longer profitable for either Fingrid or the Russian company Rosseti.
After 2022, approximately 60-70% of Russia’s external internet traffic would have passed through Finland, according to estimates from a source cited by Kommersant. An industry representative specified that up to 30% of all telecommunications connections between Russia and Finland are located on power lines, writes Antena3. Russian operators are already discussing alternative routes with Finnish telecommunications companies.
Some operators already have backup routes, but the shutdown of some of the main optical fiber connections on the Finnish route could affect the quality of communication services in north-western Russia.
For the European part of the country, however, Finland is not the only route through which internet traffic passes. There are also connections through Belarus and the Baltic states, as well as submarine cables in the Baltic Sea.
The decommissioning of some lines will, however, reduce the number of backup routes and will force operators to reconfigure the routes of international traffic. According to him, if the lost bandwidth cannot be compensated through other routes, some segments of the network could become congested. In this case, users in the European part of Russia could face greater delays and poorer access to communication services.