Endeavor Optical Networks Unveils Space-Based Laser Alternative to Vulnerable Undersea Cables

Endeavor Optical Networks Unveils Space-Based Laser Alternative to Vulnerable Undersea Cables Endeavor Optical Networks (EON) is developing space-based optical laser relays to bypass increasingly vulnerable and constrained undersea fiber-optic cables, aiming to route intercontinental data without touching the ocean floor. Subsea cables carry 95% of intercontinental internet traffic across roughly 500 active systems, but face bottlenecks including aging fleets of fewer than 60 specialized cable-laying vessels, slow permitting, and rising data demand. Physical security risks are mounting, with unresolved cable cuts in the Red Sea, Baltic Sea, and near Taiwan, alongside deep-sea surveillance and specialized cable-cutting tools developed by foreign actors. EON plans to transmit multiple terabits per second by relaying optical lasers between terrestrial ground stations and satellites in Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) using a 'bent-pipe' architecture. Recent industry shifts toward commercial off-the-shelf space hardware and standardized components have reduced spacecraft costs to roughly one-tenth of what they were a decade ago. Subsea Supply Constraints and Ownership Shifts Transoceanic cables take nearly a decade to deploy due to complex environmental permitting, landing rights, and reliance on a global fleet of under 60 specialist vessels. While telecom consortia historically shared these systems, hyperscalers like Google and Meta now own or co-own the majority of transoceanic capacity. However, the physical supply chain for laying cables is capped, unable to keep pace with rapid data growth driven by artificial intelligence workloads and cross-continental traffic. Geopolitical Fragility on the Seabed Undersea cable routes and landing stations are publicly documented, creating critical single points of failure that take weeks to months to repair. In early 2024, cuts to the Seacom, TGN-EA, and AAE-1 lines in the Red Sea forced the rerouting of a quarter of traffic between Europe, Asia, and East Africa without clear attribution. Adversarial concerns are amplified by Russian deep-sea survey activities, recurrent cuts near Taiwan, and a March 2025 Chinese research publication detailing a device capable of severing heavily armored subsea cables. Laser Relays via Medium Earth Orbit EON's proposed architecture connects terrestrial fiber networks to ground stations that project optical lasers to Medium Earth Orbit satellites, bouncing signals across oceans via a bent-pipe configuration. The company asserts that modern off-the-shelf space components enable commercial viability and deployment timelines measured in months rather than years, aiming to underprice traditional subsea cable capacity for hyperscalers and enterprises.

应对海底光缆脆弱与容量瓶颈，EON拟通过太空激光构建跨洋数据传输网络 当前全球约95%的洲际数据仍依赖约500条海底光缆，面临长达十年的部署周期、有限的施工船队以及日益加剧的蓄意切断风险。初创企业Endeavor Optical Networks（EON）提出利用商用中地球轨道（MEO）卫星和激光“弯管”中继，以更低成本和更短部署周期替代海底光缆。 全球仅约500条在役海底光缆承载95%的洲际流量，单条系统从规划到投产需耗时近十年，且受制于全球不足60艘专业铺设船。 红海、波罗的海及台湾周边海域近年来频繁发生光缆被切断且未问责的事件，俄中等国的深海活动与切断技术加剧了海底关键基础设施的脆弱性。 EON计划通过地面站向中地球轨道卫星发射激光，再中继传输至大洋彼岸的接收站，提供数Tbps级别的跨洋带宽，建设周期缩减至数月。 借助商用现成组件（COTS）与成熟供应链，航天硬件成本相比十年前下降逾90%，使太空激光网络在经济性上具备与海缆竞争的可能。 海缆建设的供给瓶颈与地缘风险 过去十余年间，超大规模云服务商已成为洲际海缆的主要出资方与容量使用者，但海底施工船队老化、专业人员稀缺以及跨国专属经济区的漫长审批，使传统建设能力见顶。与此同时，光纤物理路由公开可查，近年红海和台湾周边多条海缆被切断，修复常耗时数周甚至数月，缺乏备用路由使得网络脆弱性成为对抗环境下的严峻隐患。 EON的太空激光替代方案与商业逻辑 EON采用“弯管”架构，由地面站将激光直接射向中地球轨道卫星并转发至跨洋另一侧地面站，进而接入陆地光纤网。得益于航天产业链的标准化和商业现成硬件的普及，卫星制造成本仅为十年前的十分之一，EON计划以此提供数月内即可上线的Tbps级跨洋容量，旨在以低于海底光缆的成本提供安全且具路由多样性的洲际互联。

[America](https://www.a16z.news/t/america) | [Tech](https://www.a16z.news/t/technology) | [Opinion](https://www.a16z.news/t/opinion) | [Culture](https://www.a16z.news/t/culture) | [Charts](https://www.a16z.news/t/charts) Cutting undersea cables is now part of international conflict. The cables on the seabed carry almost all data that matters between continents: finance, intelligence, commerce, and the entire new economy of AI. Over the past three years subsea fiber has been severed in the Red Sea, the Baltics, and around Taiwan in incidents that closed without consequence. You can’t safely run many petabits of data under the ocean anymore, and the only direction left is up, leveraging space. This used to be the stuff of government research budgets and universities. Today, so much has changed in the space economy that now makes this possible. Hardware is cheaper, talent is denser, and there is proof that with meaningful investments, there can be outsized financial upside. The engineering and economics finally close. EON is taking on the data transfer problem with lasers in space, beaming fiber level data between ground stations and satellites in orbit. We’ll offer route-diverse intercontinental bandwidth that never needs to touch the seabed. Global internet data moves the same way it did thirty years ago. 95% of intercontinental data traffic moves over subsea cables spanning thousands of miles, buried on the seabed. A single cable system takes nearly a decade to go from planning to operation — environmental permits and landing rights across every sovereign nation it touches, custom manufacturing, and months of laying at sea by a global fleet of fewer than 60 specialist vessels. Today there are only about 500 active subsea cable systems in service. They are increasingly at risk. For most of the internet era, up until the mid-2010s, transoceanic systems were built by consortia of telecom carriers. A dozen or more national and private operators would pool together capital, sharing the cost of a system no single one of them could justify, and divide the capacity. Capacity would be sold out to other companies as needed. At the time, no one party controlled a route. About fifteen years ago, that all changed. As their own traffic outgrew what they could lease, the largest content and cloud companies started funding cable laying directly. The logic was straightforward: at their scale, owning the cable was cheaper than renting capacity on it. Ownership let them control routing, timing, and cost in a way leasing never would. Just over a decade ago, content providers accounted for a small minority of used transoceanic capacity; today they account for the majority of it, and they own or co-own a large and growing share of new builds, particularly on the transatlantic and transpacific routes that carry the most traffic. This was a rational response to a slow system. The world’s largest companies, such as Google, Facebook/Meta, etc, could absorb a ten-year timeline and a billion-dollar bill as a line item. Almost anyone else cannot. But that system has a ceiling. The fleet of cable-laying ships is fixed and aging, and the manufacturers who build optical repeaters and the crews who splice cable are few and far between. No amount of capital compresses a permitting cycle that runs through numberous governments’ EEZs or territorial waters that a cable touches. The supply chain that builds the ocean floor is effectively capped, and it is already running flat out. More data was created in the past two years than in all of prior human history, and a single hyperscaler now moves more across its own network in a day than the entire internet carried in 2010. Every AI model trained, every workload shifted between continents, every new region brought online pushes the curve higher. So the squeeze falls on both the companies with the most data to move and anyone trying to build new global scale businesses. The largest companies can fund cables and still can’t build them fast enough; every new entrant is competing for whatever capacity is left on a route someone else decided to build. Whether you own or rent, you are running out of room on a system that cannot grow as fast as the data crossing it. Fiber routes are public knowledge and every cable, every landing station, every chokepoint is documented. This makes subsea internet infrastructure an easy target for adversarial intervention. When Seacom, TGN-EA, and AAE-1 were severed in the Red Sea in early 2024, roughly a quarter of the traffic moving between Europe, Asia, and East Africa had to be rerouted overnight at meaningful cost. The cables were cut during an active conflict in a conflict zone, yet no party was charged. In 2022, SMW5, a cable connecting South East Asia to the Middle East to Western Europe was disrupted, and connectivity to the affected regions dropped by a third overnight. No none entity responsible for the cutting has been named. In waters near Taiwan, undersea links have been cut repeatedly, with Chinese fishing and cargo vessels logged nearby each time and dozens of similar incidents since. None of these produced a confession or a confident public attribution, which is exactly what makes the seabed attractive. When any node in this global network is cut, the repair runs weeks to months with no hot spares. Outages that would be unacceptable in any other critical infrastructure are quietly accepted as the cost of doing business. Russian deep-sea operations under GUGI, Moscow’s underwater research directorate, have spent years surveying and loitering near cable routes across the Atlantic and Baltic. In March 2025, Chinese researchers published the design for a compact device able to sever the most heavily armored cables in existence. Former NSA Director Mike Rogers has testified that adversaries can cut cables where and when they choose. In ordinary times accidents or malfunctions cause most faults, but whether a cut is accidental or deliberate, the consequence is the same. After a cut, entire regions can go dark for weeks with no alternative paths. This network fragility does not depend on anyone’s intent, and adversaries now know how to use it. EON is built to service hyperscalers, enterprises, sovereigns, and organizations with so much data that existing in-space infrastructure is not sufficient. Through an optical laser relay to Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) and back down in a “bent-pipe”, EON can deliver multiple terabits of data per second across oceans. A ground station points a laser at a satellite, the satellite catches it and fires it back down, to a receiver on the other side of an ocean. Ground stations connect to existing terrestrial fiber, far easier to deploy than anything requiring a large ship. Capacity will come online in months, not years, and can serve anywhere with a clear view of the sky. Ten years ago the spacecraft for this exact system would have cost at least ten times what it costs today. The space industry has completely shifted away from bespoke over-engineered exquisite systems to commercial off-the-shelf hardware. The space industry today has real standards, proven components, and a supply chain that didn’t exist a decade ago. That’s what makes EON viable as a business, not just as an engineering project. Every decision we make is with the current state of the art, because that’s what closes the economics. EON is building to last. We want to be the next trillion dollar space company. To do that, we need a business that closes from the start. There are countless venture backed space companies attempting science projects with the hope of economic viability in the future. That is not us. Engineers who work at EON are going to work on some incredibly hard technical challenges, but the light at the end of the tunnel is what we believe to be an incredibly strong business. Incumbents move data across subsea fiber because no one has delivered a credible alternative. It is a multi-billion dollar market held in place not by the superiority of the technology but by the absence of competition. We are going to change that, not just as a capable alternative, but a more affordable one. We are building to move bits at lower cost than subsea. That is the business. That is the test we hold ourselves to. We are just getting started. The engineering challenges ahead of us are real and we are not pretending otherwise. What orients us is our mission: secure, affordable global connectivity. The fragility of the infrastructure the world runs on is no longer a theoretical concern. It is a documented, recurring, and in some cases deliberate reality. The world has changed, but the infrastructure has not. EON is here to change it. *This newsletter is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. Furthermore, this content is not investment advice, nor is it intended for use by any investors or prospective investors in any a16z funds. This newsletter may link to other websites or contain other information obtained from third-party sources - a16z has not independently verified nor makes any representations about the current or enduring accuracy of such information. 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