Owning the Wires: Europe’s Control Over Critical Telecommunications

Telecommunications infrastructure is the nervous system of a modern economy — the networks carrying financial transactions, emergency services, military communications, and everyday life all run through cables, towers, and satellites that most people never think about until something goes wrong. Europe’s exposure here is layered: mobile network equipment has historically relied heavily on a small number of vendors, chief among them China’s Huawei and ZTE; undersea cables face physical sabotage risk, as recent incidents in the Baltic Sea have made clear; and satellite connectivity is increasingly dominated by a single American company, SpaceX’s Starlink. Control over critical infrastructure means addressing all three layers — terrestrial networks, undersea cables, and space — rather than treating any one of them as sufficient on its own.

Building European 5G and 6G

Europe is not starting from zero here: Nokia and Ericsson remain among the world’s leading network equipment vendors, giving the continent a genuine industrial base that, say, the semiconductor sector lacks. The concern that pushed 5G security to the top of the political agenda was the use of Chinese vendors’ equipment in core network infrastructure, given concerns about mandatory cooperation with Chinese intelligence services under domestic law. Several EU member states have since restricted or phased out Huawei and ZTE equipment from their networks, though implementation has varied significantly by country, with some, particularly in Eastern Europe, moving faster than others.

Looking ahead to 6G, still in early research stages globally, Europe has an opportunity to shape the technology from the ground up rather than adopting standards set elsewhere — through coordinated research funding and by ensuring Nokia and Ericsson remain financially strong enough to compete against Chinese vendors who benefit from substantial state support and, in many markets, lower pricing.

Independent Satellite Networks

Starlink’s rapid rise, and its visible role in Ukraine’s wartime communications, demonstrated both the value of satellite connectivity and the risk of depending on a system controlled by a single foreign company whose owner has shown willingness to make unilateral decisions about service access. Europe’s answer is IRIS², the EU’s planned sovereign satellite constellation intended to provide secure government communications and broadband connectivity independent of both Starlink and any non-European system.

IRIS² faces a difficult reality: it is years behind Starlink’s deployment timeline and vastly smaller in planned scale, meaning it will likely serve as a secure option for government and strategic use rather than a mass-market competitor in the near term. That narrower goal is still valuable — the point is ensuring European governments and militaries always have a communications option that cannot be switched off by a foreign decision-maker, not necessarily beating Starlink commercially.

Securing Undersea Fiber Cables

The overwhelming majority of intercontinental internet traffic travels through undersea fiber cables, and incidents in the Baltic Sea involving damaged cables and pipelines, some linked to vessels associated with Russia’s so-called shadow fleet, have exposed how physically vulnerable this infrastructure is and how difficult it can be to attribute deliberate sabotage with certainty.

Improving resilience here means redundancy — multiple cable routes so no single cut isolates a region — alongside better seabed surveillance, faster repair ship capacity (a resource in short supply globally), and closer coordination between NATO and EU naval forces to monitor and deter suspicious activity near known cable routes. No amount of monitoring makes cables un-cuttable, so redundancy of routing remains the most reliable defense.

Common European Cybersecurity Standards

Physical infrastructure is only half the challenge — the software and protocols running on top of it need consistent security standards, and today these vary considerably across 27 member states, creating uneven vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit wherever standards are weakest. The EU’s NIS2 Directive represents a step toward harmonizing cybersecurity requirements for critical infrastructure operators across the bloc, though member states are still at different stages of implementation.

A genuinely common standard also supports the equipment and satellite goals above: certification requirements that specify security baselines make it easier to justify excluding vendors that can’t meet them, and give European manufacturers a home-market advantage built on trust and compliance rather than protectionism for its own sake.

Conclusion

Telecommunications sovereignty is unusual among these self-reliance efforts in that Europe already has strong industrial champions in Nokia and Ericsson — the gap is less about inventing capability from scratch and more about political will to use it, secure the physical layer against sabotage, and build a space-based backup that no single foreign actor can switch off. Networks, cables, satellites, and standards form one interconnected system; weakness in any layer undermines the sovereignty the others are trying to establish.