This year’s International Cable Protection Committee (ICPC) Plenary brought the global submarine cable community together in Athens under the theme of collaboration to protect global connectivity. Over three days, members and industry partners tackled the technical, environmental, legal, and geopolitical challenges facing the cables that keep the world online.
Day 1
The plenary opened with updates on the ICPC’s growing membership, ongoing initiatives, and an upcoming leadership transition. Members-only sessions covered progress across the organization’s working groups, while the afternoon’s open program featured maritime law, regional case studies, and lessons from cable construction abroad.
Day 2: Data, Defense, and the Deep Sea
Day two focused on environmental collaboration, cable security, and the growing role of data in protecting infrastructure. Sessions covered seabed stewardship, combining sensing data for better monitoring, the rise of hybrid attacks on critical infrastructure, storm-resilient repair techniques, and evidence-based seabed planning. The day closed with a global repair-statistics review and a case study on coordinating repairs between telecom and power cables.
Day 3: Looking Ahead
The final day began with updates from regional cable associations around the world, then moved into a wide-ranging set of sessions covering offshore repair challenges, regulatory misconceptions, future Atlantic cable congestion, data-driven fault response, working around unexploded ordnance, and the global push to map the ocean floor by 2030. The program also included geopolitical discussions on the Mediterranean and maritime security, before closing with a panel on ecosystem-wide collaboration.
The plenary concluded with the announcement that 2027 will head to Nairobi, Kenya.
