The owner of an undersea telecommunications cable connecting Lithuania and Latvia damaged on January 2 says it expects to complete repairs within the next couple of weeks.
A spokesman for Arelion, a telecommunications company owned by Swedish infrastructure investment firm Polhem Infra, said that repair work had already been planned but would depend on weather conditions and the repair schedule for other cables in the Baltic Sea.
“Repair work is scheduled, but there are other cables in the Baltic Sea that are scheduled for repair first,” Arelion spokesman Martin Sjogren said. “Depending on weather conditions, the cable between Lithuania and Latvia should be restored within the next week or two.”
Sjogren said the fibre-optic cable was severed and that data traffic had been rerouted through other Arelion-operated networks.
He said the cable carried internet and other communications services for both individual users and businesses and organisations.
Vilmantas Vitkauskas, head of Lithuania’s National Crisis Management Centre, said on January 4 that the connection had likely been cut, though engineers still needed to confirm the exact nature of the damage.
The breach was first detected on January 2 by the crisis management centre. Its director has said the cable is a critical piece of infrastructure for both Lithuania and Latvia, providing internet connectivity to Scandinavian countries, but that the incident is not expected to disrupt services for consumers. (LRT)