What is a submarine cable?

Subsea fiber explained

Our wireless world depends on a few hundred
fiber cables laid on the ocean floor
August 26, 2021 By Dan Swinhoe Comment

Though we live in an increasingly wireless world, that connectivity

depends on wires under the ocean.

Subsea or submarine cables are fiber optic cables that connect

countries across the world via cables laid on the ocean floor. These
cables – often thousands of miles in length – are able to transmit
huge amounts of data rapidly from one point to another.

What is a submarine cable?

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 A submarine cable is a fiber optic cable laid in the ocean, connecting
two or more landing points.

Rarely much wider than a garden hose, today cables generally

comprise of the optical fibers that carry the information, which are
then covered in silicon gel, then sheathed in varying layers of plastic,
steel wiring, copper, and nylon in order to provide insulation to
protect the signal and protect the cable from damage from wildlife,
anchors & fishing, or weather & other natural events.

The cables are laid using ships that are modified specifically for this
purpose, transporting and slowly laying the ‘wet plant’ infrastructure
on the seabed. These special ships can carry thousands of
kilometers of optical cable out to sea. A special subsea plow is also
used to trough and bury submarine cables along the seabed closer
to shorelines where naval activities, such as anchoring and fishing,
are most prevalent and could damage submarine cables.

“We've had submarine cables for over 150 years,” explains Gil
Santaliz, founder and CEO of New Jersey cable landing station NJFX,
“and they've really been a way for communication between countries
and continents.”

“The most basic application is communicating what's happening in

one part of the world to another, but we've morphed that to allow
applications to exist in multiple countries at the same time, to
enhance the performance of applications, and to find eco-friendly
locations where you can run applications with a zero-carbon
footprint yet enjoy the application the country where they don't have
that resource.”
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 Subea cables; connecting the world for 170
years
Work to demonstrate the potential of subsea cables began in the
1840s, when Samuel Morse, the inventor of Morse Code, submerged
a wire insulated with tarred hemp and India rubber, in the water of
New York Harbor and telegraphed through it in 1842.

The first commercial cable was laid in 1850, when the English
Channel Submarine Telegraph Company laid a telegraph cable
between England and France. It was cut weeks later by fishermen
thinking it was seaweed. A successor company, the Submarine
Telegraph Company, laid a second cable the next year and more
cables linking the British Isles to mainland Europe followed.

In 1854 and was completed in 1858. The Transatlantic telegraph

cable – which ran from Valentia in western Ireland to Bay of Bulls,
Trinity Bay, Newfoundland – was laid by the Atlantic Telegraph
Company and only functioned for only three weeks.

The first official telegram to pass between two continents – at a rate

of a single character every two minutes – was a letter of
congratulations from Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom to
President of the United States James Buchanan on August 16.
Following progressive signal deterioration, the cable was destroyed
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 after excessive voltage was applied to try and boost the transmission
strength. While it was only in operation for a short time, it showed
intercontinental communication was possible and a second cable
was laid in 1865.

The first trans-Pacific cables were completed in 1902 and 1903,

linking the US mainland to Hawaii in 1902 and Guam to the
Philippines in 1903.

The first subsea telephone cable, TAT-1, was laid between 1955 and
1956. A joint project between the UK Post Office (of which BT was
part for a number of years), the American Telephone and Telegraph
company (now AT&T), and the Canadian Overseas
Telecommunications Corporation, was able to carry 35 simultaneous
telephone calls.

The eighth transatlantic communications cable, TAT-8, was the first

fiber optic subsea cable. Constructed in 1988 by a consortium of
companies led by AT&T, France Télécom, and British Telecom, the
cable was able to carry 280 Mbits per second. It was retired in 2002.

Today there are more than 400 subsea cables in operation. Some
connecting nearby islands can be shorter than 50 miles long. Others,
traversing the pacific, can reach more than 10,000 miles in length.
Some connect singles points across a body of water, others have
multiple landing points connecting multiple countries.

Antarctica is the only continent not yet reached by a submarine

telecommunications cable, though one is reportedly being
considered to improve connectivity for researchers in the region.
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 Cable technology evolves quickly
After choosing the desired route, specialist ships begin work of
laying the cable, which is dropped to the ocean floor. These ships
hold giant spools of cables before slowly and precisely unfurling and
laying them on the ocean floor. As the cables begin to approach land,
cables are often buried in trenches created by subsea plows in order
to protect them from damage.

Though there were reportedly 16 instances of whale entanglement

with submarine telegraphic cables were reported prior to 1966,
today cables rarely interfere with local wildlife once laid, although
they sometimes enable anemones and the like to fix into an area
where they might not otherwise be able to settle.

Sharks have been known to occasionally bite subsea cables –

possibly attracted by the electrical signals – most recently by Google
in 2014. But such events are rare, and can be countered by
additional cable armoring.

Last year more than 500,000 scallops were moved so that a fiber
cable could be laid on the seabed off Port Erin and Port Grenaugh,
on the Isle of Man in the British Isles. The 584-mile (940km)
Havhingsten Telecommunication Cable will connect the island to
Ireland, the UK, and Denmark.

Cables contain a number of repeaters, which boost the signal along

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 the length of the cable roughly every 100km. At each end, the cables
reach land within a cable landing station, from where the data is
routed to its final location.

“Fiber optic cables leverage Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing

(DWDM), a technology whereby multiple wavelengths – each
operating at rates of hundreds of gigabits per second – enable the
information-carrying capacity of a submarine cable to be
maximized,” explains Brian Lavallée, senior director of solutions
marketing at telecoms and networking firm Ciena. “Optical
amplifiers, which are still referred to as repeaters in the submarine
networking space, amplify these signals over regular intervals as
they traverse their transoceanic routes.”

In the same way the likes of OpenRAN and containers are creating
more disaggregation between components, Lavallée says the
introduction of Open Cables and disaggregation of SLTE from the
‘wet plant’ means cable systems can be more routinely upgraded
and greater diversity of choice when selecting new components.

“The Open Cables model resulted in numerous new upgrade vendors

joining the submarine networking industry, and submarine cable
operators have understood and appreciated the benefit of a broader
choice of SLTE technology and vendors. Submarine systems, such
as Southern Cross, are now capable of more than 80 times their
original design capacity with upgrades to SLTE technology.”

At each end of a cable is a cable landing station; much like a ‘normal’

data center, it houses important networking equipment which
powers the cable and controls its operations.

“Traditionally, submarine line terminal equipment (SLTE) and power

feed equipment (PFE) of a submarine cable system were installed at
the cable landing station,” says Lavallée. “In some cases, the PFE is
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 installed at a cable landing station, while the SLTE is installed in
another location inland, such as a central office or, increasingly, a
data center.”

Tough capacity on existing cables is always increasing, Google’s

Virginia-to-France Dunant cable is currently the largest capacity
cable, capable of 250 terabits per second.

Santaliz says that while satellite Internet capacity is rising while costs
are dropping, terrestrial and subsea systems are exploding.

“They're growing exponentially faster than even the satellite guys are
and pushing more and more and more through those fibers than
everyone ever thought possible,” he says. “A year and a half ago and
an 8 pair system was a big deal, and prior to that four pair. Today
they're doing 24 pair systems, and they're not just going A to B,
they're going A to B to C to D to E

“I would say in the next four years you'll see petabit systems going
across the Atlantic Ocean,” predicts Santaliz.

Following a trial earlier this year, the trans-Atlantic MAREA cable saw
its potential capacity increase from 200Tbps to 224Tbps. The joint
Microsoft-Facebook project was originally designed with a capacity
of 160Tbps.

In July, TPG Telecom announced plans to upgrade its PPC-1

submarine cable between Sydney and Guam, boosting the data
capacity of the cable by 50 percent using Infinera’s ICE6 800G
product from 8 terabits per second currently to 12 terabits per
second.

Japanese researchers recently achieved a new data transmission

record, sending information at a rate of 319 terabits per second.
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 Cost vs resilience of subsea cables
Cables were traditionally owned by consortium telecoms firms who
would band together to spread the costs of manufacturing and
deploying a cable in exchange for being able to use some of the
cable’s bandwidth. Today, cloud and hyperscale companies such as
Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are increasingly investing
in subsea cables, both as part of traditional consortiums and as
private projects.

Like any other digital infrastructure, cables can be bought and sold;
Hawaiki Submarine Cable was acquired in July by an affiliate of
shipping giant BW Group for a reported $445 million. And like any
other digital infrastructure, a cable’s main risk is an unexpected
outage.

Onland fiber outages are fairly common; cables and equipment can
be eaten by rodents – has happened in Australia and New Zealand
recently – or cut by construction works. Even cows treading on an
above-ground fiber cable once caused intermittent outages.

While subsea cables might not face danger from cows or

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 construction, risks to subsea cables do exist. Subsea cables have a
greater tolerance for failure than terrestrial fiber, but issues that do
arise can be costly, difficult, and slow to fix to the time and effort
required to first reach and then lift cables to the surface.

“The characteristics are very different on the potential for an impact

on a subsea cable to terrestrial cable,” explains Santazli. “A terrestrial
cable has 100 times greater chance of having something go wrong
with it than the subsea cable, but yet the fix on a terrestrial cable can
be days wherein a subsea environment it could be weeks.”

“You could have a problem with your subsea cable on one side –
known as a shunt fault – but it's still operational and it would take
another event to have that cable actually have an issue where it
couldn't operate. You can tolerate one shunt fault, but then you're
telling your ships to get ready to deal with this in a planned
coordinated fashion.”

“But the cost is in the millions when you start dealing with a fixed or
subsea cable, where terrestrials cables systems will be tens of
thousands to go fix.”

There are, on average, around 100 cable faults a year. While animals
and natural events are behind some incidents, the vast majority of
cable damage is caused by fishing and shipping activity.

Fixing a damaged cable is incredibly time-consuming; once a fault is

located, a ship must sail the area, find and lift the cable – both ends
if completely cut – to the surface often via a rope and grapple or
submersible robot. It can take more than a day to lift a cable from the
ocean floor at deeper depths. Any damaged length of cable is
removed and then the cable is spliced back together, sealed with
adhesives and joint, and lowered back to the ocean floor.
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 Earlier this year GTT Communications filed an injunction against local
fishermen in Ireland to stop them trawling near to two of its
submarine cables off the coast of Kilmore Quay in County Wexford.
Cables off the west coast of Africa were recently brought offline after
river flooding on land led to undersea mudslides.

In August, the Vocus Australia Singapore Cable was broken in

'multiple locations at challenging depths' off the coast of Perth,
Australia. Though Vocus never officially declared the cause, the
cable was rumored to have been broken by a ship’s anchor. The
cable was repaired and declared operational 12 days later.

Cables can be broken by natural events too. In January 2020 two

subsea cables off West Africa were damaged by undersea mudslides
potentially caused by flooding in the Congo river.

“Natural causes account for only about 10 percent of faults,” says

Ciena’s Lavallée, “but when they do occur, they tend to break cables
in multiple places, which can cause problems in an entire region.”

“We saw that happen a few times, in 2006 and 2009 off the coast of
Taiwan, and in 2011 off the coast of Japan [following earthquakes].”

Cable retirement & recycling

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 Santazli explains that there are two ends of life of a cable; there's a
physical end of life where it no longer functions and needs to be
retired, and the economic end of life where it’s not worth the money
to run a still functioning cable.

“You can have a cable that has been in the water 18 years, but
because a new system gets done that's got very similar landings the
economic life of the older system is not viable,” he explains. “They
can't compete so for commercial reasons, so even though the cable
still works they will probably turn it off prematurely because it's just
not worth keeping it.”

The cost of maintaining at least two cable points, staff, and repair the
cable as needed all represent fixed costs that make it harder to
compete if a cable with more capacity follows similar routes and
landing points to existing cables.

Once a cable is retired, however, there is often little effort made to

recover it. While copper is valuable, it’s unlikely to recoup the cost of
recovering a cable. And while many would argue leaving a cable to
deteriorate in the ocean long-term is harmful, digging up a cable
could also disturb any marine life in the area. Relocating cables is
technically possible, but rarely happens.

Santazli expects, however, that in the future there could well be more
mandates around recovering subsea cables on environmental
grounds, at least within a country’s territorial waters.

“It's an economic question today, but the environmentalists are

getting much more active demanding that we think this through.
Some states in the US are going to demand that at least for our
boundaries you don't leave that cable just sitting there rotting.”

In May, Subsea Environmental Services and Red Penguin Associates

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 announced they had been selected to decommission the 20-year-
old 15,428 km transatlantic TAT-14 telecommunications cable
system. The planning phase of the project reportedly took almost a
year, with in-shore work in US, UK, France, Denmark, and the
Netherlands alone due to be complete by the end of 2021.

The politics of subsea cables

As cable technology has improved and costs have come down,
remote countries that once would have to rely on satellite or slower
infrastructure are rapidly seeing a massive increase in local cable
capacity. In March it was announced the Galapagos Islands were to
get a new subsea link to Ecuador offering bandwidth of up to 20
terabits per second (Tbps), increasing the Islands' current capacity
by a factor of ten.

However, decisions around cable routes and participants are

increasingly having to be made with concessions to potential political
and regulatory fallout.

While the laying of terrestrial fiber can often be a political issue, it’s
usually because people and businesses are demanding more of it
from their local representatives. With subsea cables, however, their
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 transnational nature means international relations can affect where a
cable is laid and which companies are involved. Icy international
relations, particularly between the US and China, means many
proposed cables are being rethought or even canceled completely.

Earlier this year the East Micronesia subsea cable, due to connect
the Pacific island nations of Nauru, Kiribati, and Federated States of
Micronesia (FSM), was scrapped due to politics. It was reported that
the World Bank-led project declined to award the contract rather
than let it go to Chinese cable company HMN Technologies over
national security fears. Nauru is negotiating with Australia to build a
cable that would connect the island to the Coral Sea Cable system
instead.

Earlier year a Hong Kong-to-US cable was canceled due to souring

relations. The Facebook-led Hong Kong Americas (HKA) cable was
first announced in 2018, with a consortium of Tata Communications,
Telstra and the Chinese state-owned China Unicom and China
Telecom Global Limited all involved. Facebook withdrew its FCC
application amid “ongoing concerns from the US government” about
direct communication links between the two countries.

Facebook, along with Amazon, previously withdrew an application for

the Bay-to-Bay Express Cable System, which would have connected
Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and the US, for similar reasons.
Though as a potential substitute, the two companies are looking to
develop the Philippines-California CAP-1 cable without previously-
announced partner China Mobile to avoid issues with regulators.

The Pacific Light Cable Network (PLCN), a Google & Facebook

project to link Los Angeles directly to China and Hong Kong, was
scaled back for similar reasons as the B2BE system. Possibly as a
replacement, the companies recently announced a US-Singapore
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 cable project called Echo alongside the Japan-Singapore Apricot
cable, both of which avoid China.

Existing cables are also potential political problems. In the UK the

Ministry of Defence recently said the Royal Navy was to build a new
surveillance ship to help protect the country’s Internet submarine
cables. The Multi-Role Ocean Surveillance will include a bevy of
sensors and a number of remotely-operated and autonomous
undersea drones to search for foreign interference of submarine
cables, including efforts to cut or tap the fiber.

The MoD claimed that Russia was “investing in and developing

significant underwater capabilities, including deep-sea capabilities
which can threaten undersea cables.”

The 9,800 km (6,000 mi) Oman Australia Cable (OAC), expected to

be fully connected by the end of 2021, will connect Oman’s capital,
Muscat, with Perth on the west coast of Australia. Sub.co said the
cable’s route was planned to avoid possible extreme weather events
and circumvent disputed territorial waters such as the Sunda Strait
and the South China Sea.
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