Communications infrastructure
A small number of cable landing stations and switching centres carry a disproportionate share of national connectivity, in buildings that are deliberately unremarkable at ground level.
Key facts
- Communications facilities including cable landing stations, switching centres and satellite ground stations carry connectivity out of proportion to their physical size.
- Their identifying features are concentrated on the roof and in the compound, where aerial observation reaches them.
- There is no statutory drone requirement in this sector, so obligations arise through customer, carrier and interconnection agreements.
- Most sites are unstaffed or lightly staffed and monitored remotely, so a detection alert needs a route to the network operations centre rather than to the building.
- Detection is generally available to an operator. Mitigation is restricted under current federal rules to authorised agencies.
What makes this facility type different
The threat model
Identification and reconnaissance of facilities whose value lies in being unremarkable. Cable landing stations, core switching centres and satellite ground stations are often housed in plain buildings with no external indication of what they contain, and the identifying features are on the roof and in the compound: antenna arrays, dish farms, cable vaults, generator and fuel plant. Aerial observation defeats that low profile more effectively than any other method.
The regulatory position
There is no statutory requirement for communications operators to detect drones. Obligations arise instead through customer and carrier agreements, interconnection commitments and the service commitments that underpin wholesale contracts, so a physical security gap is raised by a counterparty rather than by a regulator.
What constrains the response
These sites are typically unstaffed or lightly staffed, remote for cable landings, and operated as lights-out facilities monitored from a distant network operations centre. The value is heavily concentrated, so a single site can matter far more than its size suggests, which distorts any assessment that weighs sites by footprint or headcount.
Protection by obscurity, defeated from above
A cable landing station or a core switching centre is usually a plain building. No signage, modest footprint, nothing at street level to indicate what it carries. That is deliberate, and it works reasonably well against someone driving past.
It works considerably less well from the air. The features that identify these sites are on the roof and in the compound: antenna arrays, dish farms, cooling plant, cable vaults, generators and fuel storage, and the access routes to all of them. Aerial observation collects precisely the information the low profile is intended to withhold.
Cable landing stations have a further constraint. A submarine cable comes ashore where the geography allows, which fixes the location and makes the site findable by anyone who understands what they are looking for.
Concentration changes the assessment
Most sectors can assess sites in proportion to their size. This one cannot.
A small building can carry a share of national or regional connectivity far out of proportion to its footprint or its headcount. An assessment that ranks facilities by either of those measures will rank the most consequential sites low.
The useful starting point is consequence: which facilities carry traffic that cannot easily be rerouted, and which failures propagate. That is usually a small number of cable landings and core switching sites within a much larger estate.
No regulator, but there is a counterparty
There is no statutory requirement for a communications operator to detect drones, and no equivalent of the assessment duties that apply in the water or electricity sectors.
Obligations arrive commercially instead, through customer agreements, carrier interconnection commitments and the service commitments behind wholesale contracts. In practice a physical security gap at a communications facility is more likely to be raised during a customer due diligence review than by an inspector.
That affects how the work is commissioned. There is rarely a deadline, and the output that matters is frequently a written assessment that can be shared with a counterparty.
Where alerts go
Lights-out operation is the norm, with monitoring from a distant network operations centre.
That is an advantage compared with sectors that have no monitoring function at all. Somebody is watching something, continuously, and is used to responding to conditions. The requirement is that a detection alert reaches that centre in the system its operators already use, with a defined action attached.
Settling that before specifying sensors avoids the common outcome, which is a capability that generates records nobody reviews.
Related work
- Site assessment & design Vulnerability assessment, RF survey, sensor siting and coverage modelling.
- Procurement advisory Specification and evaluation against the Authorized Systems List.
- Detection system integration Bringing sensors, command-and-control and existing security systems together.
FAQ
▸Why would a drone target a communications building?
To identify it and understand it. These facilities are intentionally plain at street level, and a great deal of their protection comes from not being obviously important. Antenna arrays, dish farms, cable vaults, generator plant and access routes are all visible from above, which is exactly the information that low profile is meant to withhold.
▸Is there a regulation that requires us to address this?
Not a statutory one. The obligations in this sector typically arrive through customer and carrier agreements and the service commitments behind wholesale contracts, so the question is usually raised by a counterparty or during a due diligence review rather than by a regulator.
▸Our sites are unstaffed. Is detection worth it?
Only where the alert has somewhere to go. These facilities are usually monitored from a network operations centre, which is a genuine advantage over sectors with no monitoring function at all, provided the alert is routed there and the centre knows what to do with it. That routing should be settled before any sensor is specified.
▸How should we prioritise across a large estate?
By consequence rather than by site size or headcount. Value is highly concentrated in this sector, so the assessment should start from which facilities carry disproportionate connectivity, which is usually a small number of cable landings and core switching sites.