The Gap SLTE Licensing Fills
For decades, the FCC regulated who could lay submarine cables and land them in the United States. What it never regulated was the terrestrial equipment that makes those cables useful. Submarine Line Terminal Equipment — the hardware in cable landing stations that converts deep-sea optical signals into the electrical signals feeding US networks — operated in a licensing void. The order adopted on June 26 closes that gap, extending FCC authority under the Cable Landing License Act of 1921 and Executive Order 10530 to SLTE owners and operators for the first time.
This was a genuine oversight. SLTE sits at the precise point where an adversary could intercept data without touching ocean infrastructure at all. It is the on-ramp to the US terrestrial internet from cables carrying, by Chair Carr's own estimate, up to 99 percent of global internet traffic. The FCC's conclusion that SLTE represents "one of the most vulnerable parts of the submarine cable networks" is grounded in documented threats: Recorded Future's July 2025 assessment found that submarine cable threats had "very likely escalated" over the preceding 18 months, and the Salt Typhoon campaign demonstrated that adversaries understand exactly where to apply pressure.
The new SLTE licensing framework is operationally sensible. Operators without security concerns receive blanket licenses. Those linked to foreign adversaries face presumptive denial and must apply individually. Annual cybersecurity and physical security risk-management plans are required, along with standing SLTE Foreign Adversary Reports. Taken together, this is proportionate to the asset being protected.
A Fast-Track That Actually Helps
The order's second major feature is the expedited approval pathway. Previously, nearly every submarine cable application triggered a full Team Telecom interagency review that could run six to twelve months or longer. For US hyperscalers — Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft — trying to deploy AI infrastructure on compressed timelines, this was a genuine bottleneck, and one the industry had criticized publicly for years.
The new rules create a presumptive exemption from Team Telecom referral for operators certifying compliance with ten security criteria. These include: no senior officials under foreign-adversary control; downstream capacity restrictions excluding adversary entities; 72-hour incident reporting; adherence to the NIST Cybersecurity Framework or an equivalent standard; and acceptance of ongoing third-party compliance audits. Meeting all ten triggers a dramatically faster track without guaranteeing approval.
This is the right model for infrastructure regulation. Rather than treating all applicants as equally suspect, the FCC rewards operators who invest in demonstrated security practices. Commissioner Anna Gomez — the Democratic member on the unanimous 3-0 panel — acknowledged the core challenge: implementing security screening "against foreign adversary threats" while simultaneously facilitating investment. The expedited pathway largely threads that needle.
Where the Equipment Ban Overreaches
The less defensible element is the ban's country-of-origin framing. The case for scrutinising Chinese equipment vendors is substantive. Huawei Marine (rebranded as HMN Tech), ZTE, China Telecom, and China Mobile have documented ties to the Chinese state. China's national intelligence laws require domestic firms to cooperate with state security organs on demand. CSIS has documented that Chinese vessels have cut Taiwan's cables 27 times since 2018 and that Chinese repair ships have been observed concealing their positions while servicing international cables. These are real concerns, not invented ones.
But a categorical ban based on country of origin — rather than demonstrated security failures or specific supply chain vulnerabilities — introduces risks of its own. With only four firms controlling roughly 98 percent of the global cable supply market, and HMN Tech accounting for approximately 18 percent of new cables laid globally over the past four years, excluding Chinese vendors from any US-touching project concentrates procurement further into three Western suppliers: Alcatel Submarine Networks, NEC, and SubCom. That concentration is itself a strategic vulnerability. It removes competitive pricing pressure and reduces the total deployment velocity the order is otherwise designed to accelerate.
The order also sets a precedent for country-of-origin security judgments that could expand over time. The Further Notice appended to the order seeks comment on additional measures, including requiring removal of existing covered equipment from operational cable systems within a specified timeframe. Applying mandatory rip-and-replace requirements retroactively to live infrastructure would impose costs that have not been quantified in the record, and risks disrupting routes serving users well beyond the original US operators.
Industrial Policy and What Comes Next
There is an undeniable industrial policy dimension to the order. The ten-criteria fast-track is calibrated to entities operating under US law, US security frameworks, and US personnel-vetting regimes. US hyperscalers with clean compliance records gain regulatory certainty for AI-driven infrastructure deployment. International cable consortia involving European or Japanese co-owners face a more ambiguous path — an issue the Further Notice does not fully address.
The FCC's order would be stronger if it separated two questions more cleanly: who must be licensed (all SLTE operators — clearly the right call), and which equipment poses unacceptable risk (a question that warrants equipment-level, not country-level, analysis). The National Institute of Standards and Technology has developed supply chain risk assessment frameworks that go beyond flag of origin. Conditioning fast-track eligibility on a NIST-aligned supply chain security plan, rather than on categorical exclusion of Chinese-origin components, would target the actual risk more precisely and survive better under adversarial scrutiny.
The order takes effect approximately 60 days after Federal Register publication, placing compliance in the fourth quarter of 2026. The SLTE licensing mandate is long overdue. The fast-track is a genuine improvement for an industry whose regulatory lag has been well-documented. The country-of-origin equipment ban reflects legitimate security concerns but reaches for the blunt instrument when a sharper one is available — and the difference will matter as the FCC considers whether to extend the framework retroactively to cables already on the ocean floor.