SubTel Forum Magazine #104 - Global Outlook

SUBMARINE TELECOMS

FORUM ISSUE 104 | JANUARY 2019

GLOBAL OUTLOOK

EXORDIUM FROM THE PUBLISHER

WELCOME TO ISSUE 104, OUR GLOBAL OUTLOOK EDITION.

I

had the opportunity to run my monster snow blower this week.

Virginia and much of the southeast received a fair amount of snow from a storm that had blown its way from the Midwest earlier. The night it began I started receiving messages on Facebook telling me what was closing the next day, allowing me to adjust my schedule accordingly and just stay home.

Only a few years ago I would have had to call numerous places in the hope they had left on their answering machines with any closing news. Now they come to me and let me know what they think I need to know.

My wife bought me “Alexa” for Christmas, which on

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face value sounds cool but in practice seems wanting. Sure I can ask: “Alexa, how much snow are we gonna get?” or “Alexa, who’s your momma?” but so can anybody else. My four-year-old granddaughter can ask her anything as well. “Alexa, what time is Paw Patrol on?” or “Alexa, why is my baby brother so smelly?” – whatever. And the fact that anybody can ask her anything is its flaw. I want something dedicated to me; something that only I can ask soul searching, life sharpening queries.

So, Alexa was moved from my bar in the living room to the kitchen table where she can be of more generic, communal use and sell her infinite products to

those so in need.

“Alexa, play Dixie Chicks” “Alexa, when’s my shipment arriving?”

“Alexa, stop!”

Instead I am relegated to my handheld Siri who responds and talks only to me in her perfect high British, answering my many life probing questions and waiting only on me.

“Hey Siri, how much snow are we gonna get?”

As always, we have some really excellent articles this issue from a number of international authors, probing such wide-ranging topics as where do we the submarine cable industry go from here?

Global Outlook is meant to be a wideopen theme and I think you’ll agree that our authors have certainly hit that mark.

Like many I am attending PTC ’19 in Honolulu. A lot has changed in our industry in the last twelve months. The sheer number of systems that are or have been built in the recent past is staggering.

Whether the quick pace will continue or not, or whether we are starting a new phase, I look forward like you to learning.

So as always, should you be attending PTC ’19, please come to our SubTel Forum booth to say hello and of course, save me a seat at the Mai Tai Bar! “Hey Siri, what’s the temperature in Oahu?”

“Alexa, ask Siri where’s my Uber.”

Good reading,

Wayne Nielsen Publisher STF

Submarine Telecoms Forum, Inc. 21495 Ridgetop Circle, Suite 201 Sterling, Virginia 20166, USA Tel: [+1] 703.444.0845 Fax: [+1] 703.349.5562 www.stf-inc.com ISSN No. 1948-3031 PRESIDENT & PUBLISHER:

Wayne Nielsen | wnielsen@subtelforum.com

VICE PRESIDENT & SALES:

Kristian Nielsen | knielsen@subtelforum.com

CONFERENCE DIRECTOR:

Christopher Noyes | cnoyes@subtelforum.com

LEAD ANALYST:

Kieran Clark | kclark@subtelforum.com

JOURNALIST & COPY EDITOR:

Stephen Nielsen | snielsen@subtelforum.com

LAYOUT & DESIGN

Weswen Design | wendy@weswendesign.com

DEPARTMENT WRITERS:

Bill Burns, Christopher Noyes, Kieran Clark, Kristian Nielsen, Stewart Ash, Stuart Barnes and Wayne Nielsen

FEATURE WRITERS:

Bill Burns, Clifford R. Holliday, Mattias Fridström, Muhammad Rashid Shafi, Panagiota Bosdogianni, Remi Galasso, Stephen Nielsen, Steve Briggs and Winston Qiu.

NEXT ISSUE: MARCH 2019 – Finance & Legal Contributions are welcomed, and should be forwarded to: pressroom@subtelforum.com.

Submarine Telecoms Forum magazine is published bimonthly by Submarine Telecoms Forum, Inc., and is an independent commercial publication, serving as a freely accessible forum for professionals in industries connected with submarine optical fiber technologies and techniques. Submarine Telecoms Forum may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form, in whole or in part, without the permission of the publishers.

Liability: While every care is taken in preparation of this publication, the publishers cannot be held responsible for the accuracy of the information herein, or any errors which may occur in advertising or editorial content, or any consequence arising from any errors or omissions, and the editor reserves the right to edit any advertising or editorial material submitted for publication.

Copyright © 2019 Submarine Telecoms Forum, Inc. V O I C E O F T H E I N D U S T RY

SUBMARINE TELECOMS

FORUM ISSUE 104 | JANUARY 2019

CONTEN TS features

12

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE OXFORD COMMA?

20

SUBMARINE CABLES

By Clifford R. Holliday

By Stephen Nielsen

16

4 QUESTIONS WITH REMI GALASSO

By Remi Galasso

24

INTRODUCING THIS YEAR'S SUBMARINE TELECOMS INDUSTRY CALENDAR COVER

By Bill Burns

4 SUBMARINE TELECOMS MAGAZINE

26

36

THE CARRIER GUIDE TO 2019

OTEGLOBE

By Panagiota Bosdogianni

By Mattias Fridstrรถm

44

30

LEADERS ARE RECOGNIZED, NOT CREATED

THE NEXT PHASE IN AFRICA'S TECHNICAL EVOLUTION

By Muhammad Rashid Shafi

By Steve Briggs

32

PLCN IS COMING IN-SERVICE IN 2019

By Winston Qiu

DON'T MISS OUR NEW REPORT THAT'S AVAILABLE NOW! PAGE 6

departments EXORDIUM........................................................ 2 STF ANALYTICS REPORT..................................... 6 BACK REFLECTION........................................... 48 FROM THE PROGRAMME COMMITTEE............... 56

FROM THE CONFERENCE DIRECTOR.................. 62 SUBMARINE CABLE NEWS NOW....................... 64 ADVERTISER CORNER................................... 66W

ANALYTICS

BY KIERAN CLARK

SUBMARINE TELECOMS MARKET SECTOR REPORT: Global Outlook Edition

T

o address the growing reporting and analysis needs of the submarine fiber industry, STF Analytics continues its Market Sector Report series – designed to provide the industry with the information it needs to make informed business decisions. The Submarine Telecoms Market Sector Report is a bi-monthly product covering a specific sector of the submarine fiber industry, coinciding with the theme of each issue of the SubTel Forum Magazine. The third edition of this report provides a global overview of the state of the submarine fiber industry.

STF Analytics collected and analyzed data derived from a variety of public, commercial and scientific sources to best analyze and project

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market conditions. While every care is taken in preparing this report, these are our best estimates based on information provided and discussed in this industry.

The following Executive Summary provides an overview of the topics addressed in this month’s report.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The submarine fiber industry has seen something of return to form the last two years with 17 cable systems and over 90,000 kilometers of cable added in 2017 and 8 cable systems and 45,000 kilometers in 2018. (Figure 1) The last time more than 90,000 kilometers of cable was added to the global network was 2009 and from

2011 to 2016 no more than 40,000 kilometers was added in a given year.

System capacity has also risen alongside an overall increase in systems added, resulting in a nearly exponential increase in global capacity. Since 2014, the average capacity of a submarine fiber system has risen steadily from 25 terabits per second (Tbps) to 60 Tbps. Additionally, more new systems are making use of 6, 8 or even 12 fiber pairs providing an even higher capacity ceiling. (Figure 2) Much of this growth has been spurred on by the changing dynamic in system ownership observed since 2016 – when Over-the-Top (OTT) providers begun to move from capacity purchasers to cable developers.

System suppliers and installers continue work at a frantic pace not seen since 2009-2010. SubCom, ASN and NEC continue to be the top suppliers with relatively little competition.

KMS Added by Year 2014-­‐2018 100000 90000 80000 70000 60000 50000 40000 30000 20000 10000 0

Companies such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Amazon have been building new cables at a rapid pace to meet their infrastructure needs. This trend shows no signs of slowing down, with a significant portion of new 90 system builds for the next several years 80 being driven by these companies.

Regional trends have changed 70 slightly, with the AustralAsia region no longer leading system growth. New 60 interest in alternative north Transatlantic routes – particularly to Vir- 50 ginia Beach – and increased desire to 40 connect to South America and Africa have pushed the Transatlantic and 30 Americas regions to the top for new system growth. (Figure 3) 20 Contract in Force rates have remained steady since 2017, indicating10 the current level of growth is sustainable. Cash rich OTTs have ensured 0 system funding and the availability of data center providers at cable landing stations have helped to solidify commercial business opportunities of prospective systems – one of the

Figure 1: KMS Added by Year, 2014 2014-2018

2016 2017 Figure 1: 2015 KMS Added by Year, 2014-2018

2018

Figure 1: KMS Added by Year, 2014-2018

Average System Capacity 2014-­‐2018

Figure 2: Average System Capacity, 2014-2018

Figure 2: Average System Capacity, 2014-2018

2014

2015

2016

2017

2018

biggest traditional roadblocks to cable seen since 2009-2010. SubCom, ASN Figure 2: Average System Capacity, 2014-2018 system viability. and NEC continue to be the top System suppliers and installers suppliers with relatively little compecontinue work at a frantic pace not tition. In fact, with other companies SEPTEMBER 2018 | ISSUE 102

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ANALYTICS

BY KIERAN CLARK disrupt existing business and network models. With the successful test of 400G wavelength technology on a live Transatlantic system at the end of 2018 this long promised capacity leap forward is finally commercially viable.

Alongside C+L band technology and continued improvements in Software Defined Networking (SDN) there is huge potential for a large increase in both system capacity and networking efficiency.

We hope this report will prove to be a valuable resource to the submarine fiber industry at large. To purchase a full copy of this report, please click the link below. STF

Figure 1: Planned Systems by Region, 2019-2021

Figure 3: Planned Systems by Region, 2019-2021

like Nexans and NSW seemingly pulling away from the submarine fiber market, the supplier industry is more consolidated than ever. However, with SubCom having recently been sold and ASN currently in acquisition talks there is some potential for a dynamic

8

shift. While unlikely, if either of these industry behemoths begin shedding assets under their new ownership significant changes can be expected to how the industry does business.

Looking forward, several new technologies coming to market could

KIERAN CLARK is the Lead Analyst for STF Analytics, a division of Submarine Telecoms Forum, Inc. He originally joined SubTel Forum in 2013 as a Broadcast Technician to provide support for live event video streaming.

He has 6+ years of live production experience and has worked alongside some of the premier organizations in video web streaming. In 2014, Kieran was promoted to Analyst and is currently responsible for the research and maintenance that supports the STF Analytics Submarine Cable Database. In 2016, he was promoted to Lead Analyst and put in charge of the newly created STF Analytics. His analysis is featured in almost the entire array of SubTel Forum publications.

PURCHASE YOUR COPY OF THE SUBMARINE TELECOMS MARKET SECTOR REPORT: GLOBAL OUTLOOK EDITION TODAY!

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OUT NOW! THE THIRD IN A NEW SERIES OF BI-MONTHLY REPORTS FROM STF ANALYTICS Submarine Telecoms Market Sector Report: Global Outlook

Featuring exclusive data and analysis from STF Analytics – • Backed by industry-leading Submarine Cable Database • State of the global market and changing trends • Overview of new & disruptive technology • Signature analysis • Priced for every budget

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BY KIERAN CLARK

ISO 9001:2015 certified designer and impl for commercial, governmen

THROUGHOUT

lementer of submarine fiber cable systems ntal and oil & gas companies

T THE WORLD.

FEATURE

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE OXFORD COMMA? The Effect of Telecommunications on Language and Life

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SUBMARINE TELECOMS MAGAZINE

BY STEPHEN NIELSEN

For Want of a Nail For want of a nail the shoe was lost.

For want of a shoe the horse was lost.

For want of a horse the rider was lost.

For want of a rider the message was lost.

For want of a message the battle was lost.

For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.

And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

T

he proverb, For Want of a Nail, can in some form be traced back as early as thirteenth century. It details how the failure of a simple nail caused the catastrophic failure in that period’s most advanced communications technology, a hand carried message, and ultimately changed the fate of a kingdom. As a journalist and lifetime learner, it’s always been amazing to me how true is the phrase “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”

Now, we’re hardly limited to a pony express anymore for wartime communication. The electrical telegraph was developed in 1844. Within 25 years, the telegraph became an essential part of real-time battle planning during the American Civil War, with more than 15-thousand miles of telegraph cable laid expressly for military use.

Of course, this hardly made a man on horseback a redundant form of communication in that war; but this highlights the way a difference of six-hundred years didn’t shake the fact that reliable telecommunications technology can be the defining factor in the destiny of a civilization. Whether in war or anything else, communication has always been an intrinsic part of a working society, never mind the scale. Governments of any kind have always relied on the best communications technology of their time to get the message across.

But things have gotten a bit away from that old system.

IN THE HANDS OF THE PEOPLE

In the last 150, years telecoms technology has undergone shift – gradual at first, and then a meteoric change – as the use of communications technology has moved out of the sole hands of large governing bodies and other organizations, and into the personal use of companies and individuals. Even when it was publicly available, the telegraph wasn’t something the average person could have in their

own home. Then came the phone lines. Now, everyone carries around a phone that is so multifunctional that the moniker barely does it justice.

As these technologies became available and even affordable, we have also seen a near constant change from decade to decade in what that technology costs and how we spend money.

As I began the preliminary research for this article, I meant to make a brief examination of some of the different ways telecoms technology has shaped the modern world. In doing so, however, I had a slightly profound moment. Like most of my research these days, my search for materials started with a keyword search on Google.com.

I typed “How has telecommunications changed the world?” and hit enter. Looking at the results, I went down the list, opening each possible resource into a new tab. After the eighth new tab, I sat back and really thought about what I’d just done.

In my profession, information is king. You need not only facts, but context. In another time, I would have gone to libraries, universities and possibly archives. I’d have contacted industry companies, begging them for company information to build this article. I would spend days, maybe weeks, collecting the kind of information that I had just pulled up in a 30 second search on the internet.

PAYING FOR THE PRIVILEGE

One of the key things about my information hunt is that if I had found 100 more articles on the subject and spent another three hours just visiting websites, it wouldn’t have cost me any more money than my already contracted monthly high-speed internet bill.

I was about seven years old when dialup internet came to my home computer, using one of the earliest versions of America Online. As most anyone born before the late 80s will remember, the early years of the internet were a veritable Wild West. Lawless in a very literal sense, because laws had yet to be written for the emerging technology.

Having no better options, you payed for it over the phone bill. And in the event you accessed a site located halfway around the world it would be charged as a long distance call.

Quite a change from an internet where I can look up French wineries and have Google Translate change the text to English.

To save on money, people had a few different commonsense rules, like limiting time online, or not downloading an excess of pictures or other content, since the bandwidth would cost. Because you would pay AOL for the account, some would share an email address. Today, of course, anyone can have a free Google Mail, AOL, or Yahoo email address for free.

JANIUARY 2019 | ISSUE 104

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FEATURE

For those that don’t know, the Oxford Comma, also called the Serial Comma, is the comma used before “and” in a listed series of three or more in a sentence. For instance: “I’ll buy bread, milk, chicken, and cheese.”

These kinds of money saving tactics came with any communications technology depending on where the money was spent.

With the creation of Collect calling, a service that would connect you over a land line over any pay phone at the cost to the recipient’s phone bill, all new ways to game the system became available.

My father once told me about the Clyde Bernard calls he would make in the 70s. After arriving at his college dorm, he would use the building’s pay phone to make a collect call, asking for Clyde Bernard.

Given the Clyde was the family dog, he wasn’t able to come to the phone and the call would disconnect with no charge, but with his parents knowing he’d safely arrived at school.

This amusing tendency for people to look for loopholes and cost cutting ways of using telecoms technology is surprisingly pervasive, and has helped shape various aspects of culture than many realize.

So here we finally come to it. What did happen to the Oxford Comma?

TELECOMS SHAPING THE NEWS INDUSTRY

For those that don’t know, the Oxford Comma, also called the Serial Comma, is the comma used before “and” in a listed series of three or more in a sentence. For instance: “I’ll buy bread, milk, chicken, and cheese.” If you’ve never noticed, however this little punctuation is absent in most print news the world over.

The Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law, almost universally accepted as the standard for journalistic writing style, doesn’t expressly forbid the use of the Oxford Comma, but if the sentence is clear without needing to use

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it, journalists are told to leave it off: “I’ll buy bread, milk, chicken and cheese.”

So why make such an esoteric change to commonly used English grammar? The practice dates back to the telegraph and to the same cost saving mentality that had my parents sharing a single AOL account.

The news industry is inexorably tied to the international telecoms infrastructure.

The term correspondent, often used as a synonym for journalist, even connotes a message from far away. So, it’s not surprising that the rise of the telegraph also led to an expansion of the role that news has. Even Lincoln, who regularly relied on the telegraph during the war, found himself then having to deal with media attention and public opinion across the Union because of the sudden ability to disseminate current events.

Like any industry, Newspapers did and continue to do whatever they can to lower overhead. In the 1860s, one of the unpreventable expenses for them was the telegraph, and it was a particularly expensive one.

In 1866, sending a telegraph via Western Union could cost a dollar or more. By the standards of the US dollar today, that would be roughly $15.79. With hundreds of messages reporting on the war, the price was high. Of course, depending on who you went to, the price varied depending on the number of words, or even characters.

And there you have it. Writers for newspapers made all sorts of changes and abridgements to their work in an effort to report the facts and hopefully make the transmission cost as low as possible. One of the simplest of these: losing the vestigial comma. After all, if you can read, follow and comprehend this sentence, is another punctuation that will

When I started using my phone to text, some distant time past in the 90s, I faithfully type out each sentence, including proper punctuation. That didn’t take long. “Be right Back” swiftly became “brb,” “talk to you later” degenerated to “ttyl,” and then there’s “lol.”

just raise the price even necessary?

Newspapers of the time didn’t think so. Over time, this became the traditional, distinctive style of journalistic writing.

And news industry writers can thank the telegraph for their distinguishing grammar. According to a Columbia Journalism Review article, the inverted pyramid, the basic article format taught to any high school newspaper student, is in part thanks to the telegraph.

When I was in the Virginia Commonwealth University school of Mass Communications, journalism students learned that you always start with the most important facts. You hook them with the first line, then you summarize the facts in the second. From there you fill in the details and tell the story, triaging the information from most to least significant.

You do this, we were told, because the average reader has the average attention span of a squirrel on a caffeine high.

By giving them the information up front, you don’t leave them with only part of the important details when they inevitably get bored and wander off.

There is, however, another important reason that in part inspired this practice in earlier journalists. As they were dependent on the telegraph, they would write the story, then wire the complete article to their editor, ready to be typeset.

Unfortunately, this was a very new and not always reliable technology. Aware that the message might be cut off part way, journalists are instructed to always include the “gist” of the news right at the beginning.

In fact, that was a rule specifically laid out in the 1909 Hand Book and Manual, published by the Associated Press.

Since then, the growth and evolution of telecoms technology has never really stopped effecting the news industry. I’ve had more than one colleague complain about the shortening news cycle, blogs replacing news and especially Twitter. Their job changes just as quickly as the technology itself.

THE CURRENT EVOLUTION

The news industry is a good example, but the whole world shifts right along with telecoms technology. The internet has completely revolutionized daily life. You don’t turn in a paper resume. I shop for Christmas at my desk.

I don’t even manually update for daylight savings time.

Still, even beyond these seemingly small differences, there is something particularly unique about this recent societal change thanks to new technologies.

I didn’t make a phone call last week.

Oh, don’t misunderstand me. I had a busy week, and I had lots to get done. It was actually very productive. But between emails, and text messages, at no point did I need to directly call and speak with another human being. And anyway, lets be honest. There’s no guarantee it wouldn’t be a machine answering.

What I’m trying to relate is that in a world where I can call Japan wirelessly from basically anywhere, actually using the phone to directly speak to anyone is gradually becoming more redundant, both because of the changes in technology and in the changes in culture. It’s more common for many in younger generations to communicate more through Facebook than through a phone call, not to mention straight text messaging.

In some ways it’s becoming a regression in communication.

When I started using my phone to text, some distant time past in the 90s, I faithfully type out each sentence, including proper punctuation. That didn’t take long. “Be right Back” swiftly became “brb,” “talk to you later” degenerated to “ttyl,” and then there’s “lol.”

In many ways, this ease of communication has also completely done away with the need for formality. A text is as much a casual chat as say “hey” while passing someone in the street. It’s a staggering difference from the rigid formality of the physical letter, something still taught as a basic writing format in schools.

In just a few decades, common communication has shrunk in form. Sentences became acronyms (brb), became letters (C U L8R), and now, a simple emoji can say everything in one image, painting our very own pictographs on the digital cave wall.

So where is this latest evolution thanks to telecoms technology taking us? I surely don’t know, but communication on a global scale is only becoming easier as connection speed improves, and new technology and services build on the old.

Still, the more things change, the more they stay the same and whatever form they take, communications technology continues to be a driving force in the evolution of all society. STF

A graduate of the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Mass Communications, STEPHEN NIELSEN has been a Staff Journalist for Submarine Telecoms Forum since 2012.

He was the Life Section Reporter for Winchester Star in 2014 to 2015, and Staff Writer for Capital News Services in 2013. He was a Finalist for Society of Professional Journalism’s Mark of Excellence Award and has supported blogging and streaming at multiple PTC and SubOptic conferences.

JANIUARY 2019 | ISSUE 104

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FEATURE

4 QUESTIONS WITH REMI GALASSO Talking Industry Trends with Hawaiki’s CEO

R

emi Galasso is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Hawaiki. He is a telecom industry veteran with over 20 years’ experience.

Prior to Hawaiki, Remi created Intelia in 2005, a leading supplier of telecommunication infrastructure networks for the Pacific Islands region. Remi’s previous experience includes senior positions in Vietnam, Malaysia and Oceania for Alcatel-Lucent, including Country Senior Officer for the Pacific Islands from 2001 to 2005.

Remi graduated from Tours business school (France) and holds a Bachelor of Business.

1.

What is Hawaiki’s mission?

Even since the Hawaiki cable project was conceived, our mission has been to create a truly carrier-neutral, highspeed fibre network servicing the South Pacific region, adding a much-needed new competitive presence, while greatly expanding service options along routes which have long been underserved.

It’s an ambition reflected in the scale of the project, being a 15,000 km deep sea cable network linking the Pacific,

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Australia, New Zealand and the US. This new capability is expected to help drive economic growth, prosperity and quality of life for Pacific Nations organisations, research institutions, people and communities, while forging stronger bonds linking them to Australia, New Zealand, the US and the rest of the world.

New Zealand’s peak research organisation, REANNZ (Research and Education Advanced Network New Zealand) was recently connected to Hawaiki, a milestone it enthused would help drive powerful new collaborations with Universities and researchers globally and in the Pacific.

For instance, the University of Otago is now using Hawaiki capacity to transfer hundreds of encrypted MRI brain scans, comprising millions of ‘data slices’, to Duke University in the US for analysis.

For Pacific Islands Nations, the Hawaiki cable - which already connects American Samoa and includes stubbed branching units for Tonga, Fiji and New Caledonia - is brought in to service transformative digital applications for health and education, helping to bridge these and other facets of the current digital divide.

Broadband access in American Samoa has been mul-

tiplied by a factor of 16 since its connection to Hawaiki - making it the most-connected territory in the Pacific Islands region - including an offer for unlimited 100Mb/s for USD $130/month. This is in sharp contrast to existing connectivity options which have been prohibitively expensive in the absence of a truly carrier-neutral cable network.

In that sense alone, the Hawaiki cable is one of the most disruptive telecommunications infrastructure projects to have been completed in Pacific for many years.

2.

What is your view on the “connectivity” market?

Demand for bandwidth over the past five years has exceeded all expectations, and we believe it will continue to do so into the future as digital technologies extend their reach into virtually every aspect of our lives.

How we communicate with friends and family, how we work and how governments and corporations communicate with each other, their customers and stakeholders has been changed forever.

The cloud and the fast-expanding universe of ‘as-a-service’ platforms require fast, reliable connectivity to fully reap their benefits. With some organisations choosing to migrate all of their systems and data to the cloud, having the ability to quickly and securely access that information is critical. The fact we had Amazon Web Services (AWS) on board as a foundation customer shows we’re already a trusted partner able to deliver on this promise.

We also acknowledge the growing need for network solutions that provide the best security and operational certainty for our customers. These issues have been brought to the fore of late amid growing incidences of cyber security threats, data breaches and new laws and regulations making organisations and executives more accountable for failures of duty.

Meanwhile, we’ve also seen an explosion of bandwidth-hungry content streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime and others, while other over-the-top services from Facebook to We Chat, YouTube, Google and countless others are more reliant than ever on submarine cables such as Hawaiki.

3.

How does Hawaiki respond to this growth and how do you make your capacity products future-proof?

Hawaiki is the most powerful system across the South Pacific, utilising very advanced fibres and high gain repeaters to deliver a very large transmission bandwidth.

It’s the first subsea cable between the U.S. west coast and Oceania that has been optimized to support coherent wavelength technology, making it the most powerful system in the South Pacific region.

But we’re not resting on our laurels.

Shortly after the cable’s commercial launch in July 2018, Hawaiki selected a suite of solutions from US network technology supplier Ciena to lift existing capacity even further.

The cable has been upgraded with Ciena’s GeoMesh solution, which will offer Hawaiki the lowest cost per transported bit and evolve to a cumulative 67 terabits per second in transmission speeds, a more than 50 percent increase up from the network’s initial capacity of 43 terabits.

This extra capacity will enable Hawaiki to meet the demands of powerful new applications such as for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), allowing the rapid transmission of massive data sets to help organisations gain critical new insights into their operations, and to drive innovation.

4.

Outside of price, what are the (new) key drivers for customers to buy capacity?

I believe the basic requirements - such as performance, reliability, diversity, latency, etc. - will continue to be the key drivers moving forward, albeit evolving over time in line with customer requirements.

As an example, cable landing stations are becoming more and more a sort of pass-through entity and customers are now looking for truly end-to-end delivery, meaning PoP to PoP connectivity from one datacentre to another. This helps them to cut intermediaries and associated costs as well as ensuring greater service availability.

This is why we decided to land our subsea cable directly in Equinix’s SY4 facility in Sydney and propose to our customers capacity from their datacentre, to the Flexential datacentre in Hillsboro, Oregon.

The main difference, from my point of view, relates to the business model of our industry, especially in the South Pacific region. For a long time, customers had to adapt to the rules of a few consortia of owners and had very little choice and flexibility in terms of price and contractual conditions.

Nowadays, customers are back at the centre of the game and thanks to new private cable systems such as Hawaiki, they can enjoy much more choice.

In a nutshell, the turn-key, carrier-neutral and open-access approach has become the new market standard, and we are at the vanguard of this exciting new industry development. STF JANIUARY 2019 | ISSUE 104

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FEATURE

SUBMARINE CABLES: An Amazing Oldster With New Life

W

hat is the most important and omnipresent component of our international economy? One might get many and varied answers to that question depending on the backgrounds and interests of the audience. But this author suggests that the only answer that makes sense is submarine cables. Today these cables carry 94% (+- 5%) of all international network traffic. Without this network of under water cables international banking, worldwide commerce, international transportation systems, a great deal of defense infrastructure, and the global availability of news that we are so accustomed to would cease to exist.

This article will review the current status of international submarine cables and provide an indication of why this is the hottest of telecom markets.

Before we look at typical current submarine cable configurations and growth forecasts, it will be constructive to review their amazing history.

HISTORY

It is remarkable that a major and indispensable component of the network we call the Internet goes back over 150 years - actually before the Civil War! These old-timers are international submarine cables. The first true international and first trans-Atlantic cable was installed between Newfoundland and Ireland in 1858 (used of course, for telegraphy use as the telephone was decades away.) The list of early advocates and developers of the undersea cable technology

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SUBMARINE TELECOMS MAGAZINE

BY CLIFFORD R. HOLLIDAY reads like a listing of the most important pioneers in telecommunications, including Morse, Faraday, Wheatstone, Cyrus West Field and Oliver Heaviside.

On August 16, 1858, Queen Victoria and President James Buchanan exchanged telegrams on the new cable. It took a ‘mere’ 17 hours and 40 minutes to transmit, the brief correspondence (fewer than 100 words in total.) But even at that tortoise speed, this represented the fastest message ever sent between Washington and London to that time.

This first cable was actually placed before the basic engineering was understood for transmission lines, which grew out of transmission line work done by Maxwell, Kelvin and Heaviside between the 1850s through the 1880s. The lack of understanding of this basic engineering led to the destruction of this first trans-Atlantic cable a few weeks after it was placed in service. One of the owners tried to increase its speed by upping the voltage. The higher voltage resulted in the cable shorting out to the water and thus destroyed it.

But while it would take another 6 years for it to be replaced, this pioneering installation marked the first step in a communications revolution that would lead, ultimately, to the creation of the international Internet. This first trans-Atlantic cable actually never worked very well, and eventually destroyed itself.

Michael Faraday showed that the effect was caused by capacitance between the wire and the earth (or water) surrounding it. Faraday had noticed that when a wire

(Transatlantic No. 1) was the first transatlantic telephone is charged from a battery (for example when pressing a cable system. Between 1955 and 1956, the TAT-1 cable telegraph key), the electric charge in the wire induces an was laid between Gallanach Bay, near Oban, Scotland and opposite charge in the water as it travels along. In 1831, Clarenville, Newfoundland and Labrador. It was inauguFaraday described this effect in what is now referred to rated on September 25, 1956, initially carrying 36 teleas Faraday’s law of capacitance. As the two charges attract phone channels. In the 1960’s amplifiers (tube based) were each other, the exciting charge is retarded. The core acts as added to cable construction, and some of these are still in a capacitor distributed along the length of the cable which, limited use today. coupled with the resistance and inductance of the cable, limits the speed at which a signal travels through the conductor of the cable.

CURRENT CONFIGURATIONS Early cable designs failed to analyze these effects corThe new submarine cables are, of course, fiber optic based rectly. Famously, E.O.W. Whitehouse had dismissed the and handle up to nearly 200 Terabits per second! Theses problems and insisted that a transatlantic cable was feasicables connect all the continents (except Antarctica) and ble. When he subsequently became electrician of the Atmost major islands. They are a critical part of international lantic Telegraph Company, he became involved in a public communications, handling over 94% of all international dispute with William Thomson. Whitehouse believed that, traffic. They make international business possible as well as with enough voltage, any cable could be driven. Because of being key to many national defense efforts. the excessive voltages recommended by Whitehouse, Cyrus The newest cable systems are capable of very high data West Field’s first transatlantic cable never worked reliably, transmission rates. Marea, for example, is the highest-caand eventually short circuited to the ocean when Whitepacity under sea cable to cross the Atlantic, providing up house increased the voltage beyond the cable design limit. to 160 terabits of data per second. Google is in progress Thomson designed a complex electric-field generator on a system, scheduled to be in service in 2019. This is the that minimized current by resonating the cable, and a PLCN system which will stretch from Los Angeles to sensitive light-beam mirror galvanometer for detecting the Hong Kong and is capable of 120-terabits-per-second. faint telegraph signals. Thomson became wealthy on the Submarine cable systems are basically fairly simple. royalties of these, and several related inventions. Thomson Some of the details are a little more complicated but as an was elevated to Lord Kelvin for his contributions in this overview the following sketch illustrates the main compoarea, chiefly an accurate mathematical model of the cable, nents in any system. The elements identified are: which permitted design of the equipment for accurate telegraphy. The effects of atmospheric electricity and the geomagnetic field on submarine cables also motivated Submarine Cable Components Layout many of the early polar expeditions.

Thomson had produced a mathematical analysis of propagation of electrical signals into telegraph Repeater cables based on their capacitance and s resistance, but since long submarine cables operated at slow rates, he did Landing not include the effects of inductance.

Site By the 1890s, Oliver Heaviside had produced the modern general form Branching Equalizing of the telegrapher’s equations, which Unit Unit included the effects of inductance and NA which were essential to extending the theory of transmission lines to higher frequencies required for high-speed Europe data and voice.

Almost 100 years later, TAT-1 JANIUARY 2019 | ISSUE 104

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FEATURE Major Sources of Dataof Traffic Major Sources Data Trafic 35,000,000

do not involve branching, but most have at least some branching with multiple landing points on one or both ends.

FORECAST

30,000,000

As noted earlier, submarine cables are one of the hottest growth areas of AAA Traffic 25,000,000 the entire Internet. This, despite the fact H-S Traffic Mobile Data Traffic that recent years have seen dramatic 20,000,000 International Data Traffic growth in construction and capacity. To start a review of forecast for this seg15,000,000 ment we will look at a graph that illustrates total US Internet traffic from all sources. As can be seen on the following 10,000,000 graph International Traffic is one of the fastest growing segments.

5,000,000 While Total Traffic continues to grow substantially through the period, AAA 0 traffic (traffic from advance accesses – FiOS, etc.,) levels off due to loss of customer penetration over the timeframe. H-S traffic – other data accesses Notes for the Graph: such as ADSL is level at a very low rate Notes for the Graph: the or interval. Combined, these effects traffictraffic refers torefers Advanced traffic, i.e., traffic that comesi.e., from FiOS or similar based fromfor •• AAA AAA to Access Advanced Access traffic, traffic that fiber comes FiOS similar fiber based systems. cause Total Traffic to slow in growth systems.

•• H-SH-S Traffic to traffic from highaccesses speed, non-fiber rate towards the end of the period as the Traffic refers torefers traffic from high speed, non-fiber such as ADSL andaccesses its derivatives.such as ADSL and Traffic its derivatives. impact of the loss of AAA growth over• Mobile refers to all traffic originating or terminating on mobile devices.

•• International Mobile Traffic refers to all traffic originating or terminating on mobile devices. shadows growth in International Traffic Traffic is self explanatory • International Traffic is self explanatory and Mobile Traffic.

As can be seen from the above graph, The graph and the following one are based on previous work done by the author in The graph and the following one are based on previous work done by the author in by 2023 international traffic becomes a preparation of reports for Information Gatekeepers. preparation of reports for Information Gatekeepers. substantial percentage of the total (about 20%) when looking at the total US trafUS Data Traffic US Data Traffic fic picture. This means a strong demand for submarine cable infrastructure.

The next graph, following, is a break• Submarine cable down of just the International Traffic.

• Landing equipment – accepts the signals from (and This chart shows the relative importance of traffic to and delivers to) terrestrial sources and combines and condifrom various areas to the total US International Traffic. tions them for introduction to the cable.

This total traffic continues to grow at a strong growth rate • Repeaters – to amplify the signal periodically (repeat it) through the period. All segments of it (traffic to/from all to make up for optical losses. areas) continue to grow.

• Branching units – to allow multiple terrestrial sources to As can be seen, while all segments grow, the Pacific area be connected to a single cable. overtook the European by about 2016-17, and becomes • Equalizing units – to compensate for the unequal loss very significant by 2023, reaching half of the total traffic. encountered by different frequencies/wavelengths (disThis is driven by the rapidly growing economies of that persion) in the fiber. area including China, India and Korea. European and Latin All modern submarine cable systems employee variations America traffic also continue to grow, but at slower rates than Pacific traffic. of the above scheme. Some are strictly point-to-point and 19 99 20 00 20 01 20 02 20 03 20 04 20 05 20 06 20 07 20 08 20 09 20 10 20 11 20 12 20 13 20 14 20 15 20 16 20 17 20 18 20 19 20 20 20 21 20 22 20 23

TB/Mo

Total Data Traffic

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SUBMARINE TELECOMS MAGAZINE

International Traffic

International traffic in KiloinTerabytes KiloTerabytes 7,000

GROWTH AREAS

Total Over Seas Traffic - To /from North America Transpacific Traffic

CLIFFORD R. HOLLIDAY Is President of B&C Consulting Services. Mr. Holliday’s recent work experience has been focused on the development and publication of major marketing and technical reports in the telecommunications network area. These reports (over 50) have been published by Information Gatekeepers, Inc. of Boston, and have been highly successful. In this work Mr. Holliday was one of the earliest analysts to identify the importance and applications of many network elements that underpin today’s fiber communications systems.

These include the ROADM (Reconfigurable Optical Add/Drop Multiplexer,) the DWDM (Dense Wavelength Division Multiplex) and Terabit Routes. His latest works continue that trend, identifying the impacts of developing

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KiloTeraBytes/Mo.

6,000 Today, 94 (+/- 5%) percent of international communications touches Transatlantic Traffic a subsea cable, and with data traffic 5,000 volumes accelerating at breakneck speed Latin American Traffic (see above chart on US data growth) the need for more submarine cable systems 4,000 is obvious and increasing.

It has been projected that global sub3,000 marine cable capacity will increase up to 143 percent between 2017 and 2022, and a construction boom is already 2,000 underway. In 2016, 62,000 miles (and 100,000 miles in 2017) of submarine 1,000 cable was added globally. To realize how significant these figures are, for comparison the total submarine construction 0 didn’t break 19,000 miles of added cable between 2013 and 2016. Thus, in recent years there has been a decided up-tick in submarine cable construction to meet the ever growing traffic demand. Of late, a major driver of this traffic has been Notes for the Graph: the international clientele of the on-line • Transpacific Traffic refers to that traffic originating or terminating in the US and going to points powerhouses - Facebook, Google and in/on the Pacific Ocean (other than South or Central America.) others along with some of the major • Transatlantic Traffic refers to that traffic originating or terminating in the US which goes to cloud computing companies such as points in/on the Atlantic Ocean (other than South or Central America.)

Amazon.

• Latin American Traffic refers to that traffic originating or terminating in the US going to points in The charts and various projections South or Central America. make the fact of growth resulting in the need for submarine cable capacity very US International Traffic by Source obvious. One question that remains is where will this growth be? An obvious antechnologies on the communications network. He has also been a prolific writer swer is in the US - Pacific sector, but all sectors will experi- with three (non-technical) books, numerous articles and monthly and quarterly newsletters to his credit. ence above average growth, probably for the entire forecast He has served as a consultant in selected circumstances, founding the period of the graphs suggesting a continuation of the boom consultancy, B&C Consulting Services. In this role he has designed major fiber in cable construction. As noted in the beginning, this oldnetworks (e.g., for an entire European country, a multi-campus network for a very large school district, an industrial network for an Asian company, and ster of the Internet has plenty of life in it and is, in fact, is a network for an entire state) and has been able to assist companies in making the key to the continuation of international commerce. STF design direction and management decisions. These consulting activities have

served customers on three continents.

Life in the corporate world began for Mr. Holliday with a 31 year career with GTE. At GTE he was involved in virtually every branch of engineering and planning and rose to the position of Vice President of Advanced Technology Planning in the Business Development Department. While in that position, he oversaw the GTE Telops Special Projects Budget ($500,000,000 annually;) worked with GTE executive management and Human Resources to develop the technology organization for the company for the 21st Century; was responsible for developing the forerunner architecture to the Verizon FiOS plan; and supervised the GTE Telops interface with GTE Laboratories (90% or the Labs’ budget.)

The data and much of the discussion in this article comes from the author’s much more comprehensive report at Information Gatekeepers (www.igigroup.com).

JANIUARY 2019 | ISSUE 104

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FEATURE

INTRODUCING THIS YEAR’S SUBMARINE TELECOMS INDUSTRY CALENDAR COVER: The Henry Morris Ash 1884 Lithograph

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BY BILL BURNS

C

overs of previous Submarine Telecoms Industry calendars have featured paintings by professional artists who accompanied the early Atlantic cable expeditions, and also by cable engineers and operators for whom drawing and painting served to fill quiet periods. This year’s cover is by Henry Ash, who was a shipboard draftsman and hydrographer for Siemens Brothers of London for many years in the late 1800s. He sailed on CS Faraday (1) eight times between 1879 and 1900, and when he wasn’t performing his duties as hydrographer, he made many postcard-size pencil sketches of cable laying scenes and the terrain around cable landing sites on both sides of the Atlantic.

After the success of the 1866 Atlantic cable, many more cables were laid on this very profitable route through the turn of the 19th century, and Henry Ash was on the cable staff for over half of them. His first known pencil sketches date from 1879, when he was 28 years old, and were made on the CS Faraday (1) voyage to lay the French Atlantic cable from Brest, France, to St. Pierre, near Newfoundland. Subsequently he was on expeditions in 1881 to lay an Atlantic cable from Porthcurno to Nova Scotia, and in 1882 a second cable on the same route; in 1884 from Ireland to Nova Scotia with connections to Massachusetts and New York at the western end and England and France at the eastern end; in 1889 from Nova Scotia to New York; in 1894 from Nova Scotia to Ireland with an onbound connection to England; and in 1900 from Nova Scotia to Ireland via the Azores.

Henry Ash’s pencil sketches from all these expeditions were meticulously drawn, and each was titled and dated, so they can be easily linked to the events of each voyage. He was particularly fond of his drawings from the 1884 expedition, and published a lithograph that year with scenes of cable laying based on the original pencil sketches. This 1884 lithograph is the 2019 calendar’s cover.

Central to the print is Ash’s drawing of Siemens Brothers’ first purpose-built cableship, CS Faraday (1). Launched

in 1874 and incorporating many innovations, the ship had twin screws and a bow rudder, as well as swivelling bow and stern sheaves which prevented the cable from riding up the side of the sheave when ship and cable were not in a straight line. Faraday was in cable service for the next fifty years, laying 50,000nm of cable, and was not broken up until 1950.

Woven around the seven main illustrations are lengths of cable, grapnel chain, and stoppers, interspersed with two types of cable buoy, sections of cable, a mushroom anchor and a grapn el. As well as Faraday, the lithograph shows the Siemens cable works in Charlton, London; the cable landing points at Waterville, Ireland and Coney Island, New York; the cable houses at Dover Bay, Nova Scotia and Cape Ann, Massachusetts; and landing the shore end at Cape Ann. In 1894 Henry Ash made a second venture into publishing, this time with a bo k of thirty of his sketches titled “Souvenir of the 1894 Mackay Bennett Atlantic Cable, Laid by Messrs.

Siemens Brothers Co. for the Commercial Cable Company, ” and reproduced in the 7” x 4” format of his originals.

He retired from cable service some time between 1901 and 1911.

More information on Henry Ash, and images of 97 of his pencil sketches made on cable expeditions, accompanied by newspaper accounts describing the events of each lay, can be found at http://atlantic-cable.com/CableStories/ Ash/index.htm. STF BILL BURNS is an English electronics engineer who worked for the BBC in London before moving to New York in 1971.

There he spent a number of years in the high-end audio industry, writing equipment reviews and magazine articles on technical subjects. His research for these led to an interest in the history of communications, and in 1994 a chance find of a section of the 1857 Atlantic cable inspired him to set up the Atlantic Cable website - http://atlantic-cable.com. The site now has over a thousand pages on all aspects of undersea communications from 1850 until the present, and Bill’s research into cable history has taken him to all of the surviving telegraph cable stations around the world, and to archives and museums in North America and Europe.

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FEATURE

THE CARRIER GUIDE TO 2019:

TRAFFIC, TECHNOLOGY AND UNSUNG HEROES

BY MATTIAS FRIDSTRÖM

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A

ccording to the Chinese calendar, 2019 will be the Year of the Pig - a great year to make money and invest, according to a culture that considers pigs to be the symbol of wealth and good fortune.

With ongoing industry-wide cost management trends in the face of ever-increasing technological and broadband capacity demands, all of us in the telecom industry certainly hope this will be the case. Regardless of market sector – enterprise, cloud, data center or operator – we would all enjoy a fattening of our bottom lines in the year ahead. Unlike our porcine friends, achieving this requires that we remain lean and nimble to react to the constantly changing environment around us. And so as a continuation of the ‘Top 3’ predictions for the year

ahead that we shared in January 2018, here are some thoughts for 2019.

TOP 3 OVERALL GLOBAL CARRIER INDUSTRY TRENDS

1. Everything must be sustainable. While traffic growth continues and networks expand every day, there is a real need to look at the longer-term perspective.

Will the way traffic is managed today be sustainable tomorrow? Are we making sure we run every part of the network with the lowest possible energy consumption and are we driving fast enough towards carbon-free emission from the energy sources we use?

Considering these questions while building to meet capacity demand will not only help to save the planet, but can also lead to significant cost reductions over time.

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FEATURE 2. The art of fragmentation. Providing network services is not something you do on your own anymore. More and more parts of your business need the assistance of specialized partners who provide a piece of the bigger puzzle.

Companies are specializing on being best at “something” to monetize their niche expertise, and the right mix of many “somethings” often make up a great solution for the market. More partnerships will also be based on either revenue sharing or cost savings models during 2019, as taking a smaller slice of a bigger pie helps improve revenues all around and focused expertise delivers improved solutions.

3. Handling National Security requirements while still scaling your network resources globally is a question that needs to be addressed during the coming year. Countries develop cybersecurity plans and programs, and each of them needs to be considered when expanding and running networks within their jurisdiction. It’s not always the most cost-effective approach but is still vastly important as questions about data sovereignty and security still loom in a post-911 environment.

TOP 3 TECHNOLOGY AND TRAFFIC TRENDS 2019 1. Making your network ready for 400G and beyond. The step the industry took to go from 10G to 100G services was not the smoothest we have seen. To avoid making the same mistakes again, moving from 100G to 400G services is something that every larger carrier with ambitions needs to carefully plan for. This will take place at the same time as more open-line systems become available and the trend to decouple is stronger than ever. Shortening the cycle for large upgrades means carriers need to know exactly what they’re building for, and future-proofing investments has never been more important.

2. 5G is here now. Having now spent a few years on simulating and testing 5G services in various labs and controlled field trials, this will be the year when we see real services coming into the market. Because of the infrastructure required to support such a large jump in speed, rollouts will not be omnipresent as with 3 and 4G. 5G will instead be very business-case driven, with services required to add value that a 4G or a WiFi network could not accommodate.

3. The way Multicloud reshapes the WAN. It’s still very much debated what SD-WAN really is, but considering the number of enterprise customers who now view the public internet as their potential backbone for underlying

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services, it is clear that we need some dedicated software to manage all this traffic efficiently. This, together with the trend to use more cloud-driven services over the public internet has the potential to significantly change the enterprise market during 2019 – especially for companies whose dedicated MPLS contracts will expire in the foreseeable future.

TOP 3 TRENDS IN PEOPLE YOU NEED 1. There has always been a need for people with good IT skills but as the “softwareization” of everything takes over, there is really no limit to how many skilled IT people you need to run your network operations today. Everything that can be handled with IT will be handled with IT. Machine learning is already here and the first signs of tangible AI services will emerge during 2019.

2. Not everything can be run by IT, since the underlying traffic protocol used for the foreseeable future will still be based on IP. Finding people that know IT or IP is not that hard. Finding people that know both IT and IP is a lot harder. When machines take over many of the network functions that were previously done manually, you need to make sure they are programmed by people who understand what really needs to be done and when.

3. If everything in your company is to be IT-centric, then you don´t just need ordinary IT experts. You need people who really understand software coding. You can certainly outsource some of this to system integrators or vendors but if you want the real benefits here and now, you should secure these resources in-house. These skills are rare and in great demand, so the need for highly skilled engineers will not abate in 2019.

TOP 3 ABBREVIATIONS YOU MUST KNOW 1. API (Application Programming Interface). The days when systems were re-built and integrated before they could work together are long gone. As more and more systems are required to talk to each other and increasing amounts of data flows between them, you need to have full control of the APIs in your systems. By using open APIs, or by letting others know your proprietary APIs, they can easily exchange information without manual intervention.

2. AWS (Amazon Web Services) and other major cloud providers will be household names when enterprises consider

where to store, use and develop their data. This also means you’ll need to work with the right connectivity partners since a data center without a good connection is pretty useless. Cloud and data center interconnect will continue to be the strongest growth sectors in the market.

3. GHz (Gigahertz). Even if 5G would like to take over absolutely everything it is still important to remember that the radio frequencies required are a limited resource. Not every frequency works and many of them are already occupied by other types of traffic or signaling service. As both IoT and 5G need space in the spectrum, it will be key for operators, or whoever else uses the airwaves, to secure their frequency band allocations before launching services.

TOP 3 AREAS WE CANNOT AUTOMATE 1. Cable repairs. While we can make the actual repair work much quicker and smoother, by using better technology, it is still impossible to automatically repair a cable that has just been cut by an excavator. We have systems to detect faults quickly and re-route traffic accordingly, but for the actual repair work we still rely on people taking their vans, shovels or scuba gear to the site in order to physically repair the cable.

2. Last-mile access. We can connect more and more buildings and we can pre-wire cross connects and other things but we still rely heavily on someone to take the final piece of the cable and plug it into equipment at an enterprise facility, for a live end-user connection. As much as we would like to automate all of this, we do not see it happening. 5G may be a solution for some applications but fiber cables are still the best and most reliable option for high-speed access.

3. Bringing on large chunks of data. It is still a fact that without any equipment at the end of a cable you wouldn’t get anything out of it. The more you deploy, the more traffic you can handle but in today’s world, where pay-as-you-grow models prevail, very few carriers dare to build excess capacity for their networks to accommodate traffic spikes. There is no way you can automate your way around this challenge.

TOP 3 UNSUNG HEROES 1. The early morning router configurator. Trying to find an hour during the week when Internet activity is at its lowest ebb has never been easy, but these days it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. The small hours of the

weekend used to be a universally accepted quiet period but as behaviors shift and the connected society stays awake, it is harder to limit the impact of planned works. Currently, Monday mornings between 4.00 – 5.00 AM seem to be the only time when it is not “really bad” to make changes in the network. The Gamblers have lost their final hand and that one last, late night movie has ended. With only a single hour per week and multiple time zones to consider, this job can be tough – even at the best of times.

2. The aerial cable repairer. In many countries, bird hunting is a popular pastime. Unfortunately, birds like resting on aerial cables after a long flight and as you might expect, hunting rifles, birds and cables don’t mix well. To make life even harder, aerial networks and hunters tend to hang-out in the same places. As these outages usually happen in remote areas, repairing them is even more tricky. Add harsh weather and temperatures of minus 20 degrees Celsius and it is easy to identify our heroes. Heroes who even risk being shoot at whilst going about their work.

3. The zombie cable guy. With ever increasing bandwidth demands and the irresistible temptation of sweating just that little bit more from legacy cable assets, managing old cable systems is rather like keeping vintage aircraft aloft.

We get very attached to them but the older they get, the more manpower, resources and love they require. Although we’ve reached the point where many of the older systems are simply no longer cost-efficient, we still rely on them heavily. Without the dedicated engineers, often found in lonely, far-flung places, the global Internet would simply grind to a halt.

Predictions are, of course, just that and we hope that everyone in the telecom ecosystem - the partners, end users and companies in between - see a fattening of their piggy banks in the year to come. One thing is certain though, 2019 will be full of excitement and change. As we always say at Telia Carrier, “You can’t predict the future, but you can be ready.” STF With over 20 years in the telecommunications industry, MATTIAS FRIDSTRÖM can be considered a veteran – but his enthusiasm hasn’t faded.

Mattias combines expert knowledge with anecdotes from behind the scenes and deep insight into the networked economy: What are the challenges of tomorrow for network providers? How can we meet ever-increasing traffic demand and customer quality expectations within the same cost frame?

Mattias holds an MSc in Electrical Engineering from the University of Wollongong, Australia. Since joining Telia in 1996, he has worked in a number of senior roles. within Telia Carrier and most recently as CTO. Since July 2016 he is Telia Carriers Chief Evangelist.

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FEATURE

LEADERS ARE RECOGNIZED, NOT CREATED

BY MUHAMMAD RASHID SHAFI

I

am inclined to express my narrative after witnessing certain captions on electronic media that “We create Leaders in the organizations”. Somehow the other, I tend to disagree.

I hadn’t only read it from various sources but had the chance to hear them as well from prestigious institutions and authors.

I have a background emanating from a small dwelling to a posh housing, a small society to a polished society, street mates to learned fellows, a public school to prestigious universities, a street sports player to a national sports player, working in Public, Private, Multi-national organizations and Entrepreneurships. This gave me the benefit of possessing a dual perspective when it came to analyzing such content. Given this dual perspective, means mentioning a long history of touching diversified facets of life and meeting people of distinguished abilities coming from humble to all kind of backgrounds.

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My experience guides me to the notion that leaders are present among people in all spheres of life and all kind of backgrounds. Leaders have skills, capacities and a disposition, distinctive from others, are according to the environment they are brought up and exposed to opportunities.

Their skills are akin to having a competitive edge from other individuals. Not all leaders make it to the top, but they are yet, still leaders of their respective spheres.

With these divergent platforms, opportunities and circumstances one encounters, a leader only needs a platform, much like a social setting, to exercise the already existent leadership qualities. Which brings me to the ideology, that, we don’t create leaders. We recognize them.

The question is as to how to recognize a leader in a pool of candidates. Simple, you need to be a leader to recognize another leader. I’d like to narrate this through one

of my personal experiences. Once, I had to establish a production line of manufacturing telecom equipment of around 200+ workers, mostly young girls from low income group families. I were to choose their line supervisors for managing different production lines. I could observe the varying disposition of the girls during interviews and training periods as how some girls were rippling up by taking extra initiatives, helping their mates, assisting and managing the assigned work.

These girls were certainly their leaders not because they were taking extra initiative/burden but pulling their mates along the course. These shining girls were given the opportunity and turned out to have themselves recognized as leaders. We polish their abilities and enhance their capacities to deliver to their maximum. The leadership qualities that one possesses, is like your intuition. It’s already there. It just needs the opportunity to display itself.

Giving another example of a sudden calamity in an area like an accident on the road or falling building with habitants. We generally witness two kinds of people.

There are the bystanders, there are the helpers, and then there are the leaders, guiding the helpers and leading the effort themselves. Surely these are the people who are taking extra initiatives or burdens and crating their followers by self-examples; are true leaders. There are numerous examples that can assist in substantiation, but the gist will remain the same. Similarly, organizational and political leaders have the same pigmentation and inborn qualities that can be recognized. However, their qualities and capacities can be polished by providing a motivational environment, opportunities, learning and guidance.

We can see an array of leaders from a low domain to a national or spiritual leader. One common characteristic is that they have intuitive capabilities that shine at a certain stage of their lives. Their bodies radiate this as an out flux to make them to think and do more for others or to support a cause. Hence, they think of a goal/vision and take initiative to achieve the same. They make themselves as examples for others to follow. The echo system around them may or may not be in line with their missions. In such

One common characteristic is that they have intuitive capabilities that shine at a certain stage of their lives.

Their bodies radiate this as an out flux to make them to think and do more for others or to support a cause. Hence, they think of a goal/vision and take initiative to achieve the same case, they need to turnaround the echo system in order to achieve their goals.

As a manager, it is our responsibility to recognize leaders, provide conducive environment and coaching to enhance their capability and capacity so they may rise to next step of the leadership ladder.

On the contrary some people would like or force them to be leaders by virtue of inheritance, wealth, power, pretention or wickedness. Such leadership is not lasting, welcomed at large and is likely to succumb sooner or later. STF MR. RASHID SHAFI is one of the most reputed business leaders in Pakistan who has attained a 34 years’ experience spanning across telecommunications, high-tech electronic manufacturing and oil & gas servicing industries. Mr. Shafi’s business portfolio eminence is reflected by his exemplary accomplishment at revolutionizing international and domestic telecom fixed-line businesses and operations, elevating sustainable profitability and growth. His visionary leadership approach at senior management roles have enabled organizations to develop flagship products, construct entrenchment strategies for existing services and penetrative plans to capitalize on emerging market opportunities.

Mr. Shafi holds Bachelor’s & Master’s degrees in electrical engineering.

He is a graduate of Advance Management Program from Harvard Business School, USA and Advance Leadership Program from Cambridge Judge Business School, UK. Mr. Rashid Shafi is currently heading the Long Term Strategic Plans of Multinet Pakistan (Pvt.) Ltd since 2005 as SEVP & Chief Strategy Officer. It has been due to his contributions, guidance, mentoring and entrepreneurial leadership that Multinet has emerged as one of the strongest forces at Pakistan’s telecommunications landscape.

He is widely accredited for his advocacy to promote a subtle, open and neutral telecom regulatory framework that has been acknowledged and adopted by the industry. Pakistan telecom industry witnessed new trends of telecom connectivity businesses due to his continued efforts with telecom operators around the world. Consequently, Pakistan is seen as an open telecom environment having best world-class telecom practices that has been attracting investors for the uplift of the ICT sector in the country. He has been continuously working with the neighboring countries to provide diverse global connectivity routes for Pakistan.

On his personal forte, Mr. Shafi has been actively working with international organizations for the proliferation of broadband and use of emerging technologies for improving the life of masses.

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FEATURE

PLCN IS COMING IN-SERVICE IN 2019

BY WINSTON QIU

F

ollowing the landing at Deep Water Bay in Hong Kong in March 2018, PLCN landed at Dockweiler Beach in Los Angeles in November 2018. With tremendous efforts from professional teams of PLDC and the PLCN parties, PLCN has achieved one and another milestone.

Being the first cable connecting Hong Kong and US directly, the first C+L bands technology enabled submarine cable system in the world and the largest capacity submarine cable across the Pacific Ocean, PLCN is coming in-service in 2019.

PLCN PROJECT UPDATES

Starting from the second half of 2018, PLDC as the major investor, builder, owner and operator of the PLCN cable system, has been keeping the progress of PLCN project transparent. All information about the PLCN project schedules and the most recent updates have been communicated by emails to our key partners and publicly announced at PLDC’s official website. PLDC welcomes network and capacity planners to contact directly for any updates of PLCN

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project and include PLCN in your product portfolio.

By the end of 2018, the manufacturing of all terminal equipment, repeaters and cables for PLCN project have been completed and tested with good quality. The installation of marine cable is going on.

The major marine cable installation is conducting with four phases as shown in the following figure. The first phase of 2A segment installation of approximately 1650km cable from shore-end in Los Angeles and westwards has been completed. The installation of 1A segment of about 3700km cable is going on and is expected to be competed in March 2019. The part of 1B/2B segment which is another 8000km of cable has been loaded on board. Last but not least, segment 2C as the final installation, about 1570km of cable across the South China Sea is scheduled to be done in early of the third quarter in 2019.

While PLDC sees no obstacles or uncertainties on any permitting issues, PLDC is expecting to launch PLCN cable for commercial service ahead of the current schedule if there will be good weather allowing faster installation.

MARKET PERSPECTIVES

Busy hour (or the busiest 60-minute period in a day) Internet traffic will increase by a factor of 4.8 between 2017 and 2022 and the average Internet traffic will increase by a factor of 3.7.

As a leading capacity planner and IP peering coordinator for a large scale network, I keep good connections with backbone network architects worldwide.

I understand many of peers were nervous about their capacity requirement across the Pacific Ocean, from bandwidth supply and diversity points of views. Several of the trans-Pacific systems have been of high utilization and being difficult to supply large scale of capacity between Asia and the US. For examples, the Asia-America Gateway (AAG) connecting South-East Asia, Hong Kong to the US had a final upgrade in 2018, with little capacity available. Another example would be Trans-Pacific Express (TPE) connecting China, Korea, Japan and the US which is almost fully equipped, almost using up its trans-pacific capacity while has been

frequent outages in the past years. And the newly completed New Cross Pacific (NCP) is unable to supply capacity to China yet. As for those cables connecting Japan and the US, most of them are of high utilization. Capacity on the latest FASTER cable was occupied even faster than its name implies.

According to the Cisco Visual Networking Index: Forecast and Trends, 2017–2022 published in the late November, the annual global IP traffic will reach 4.8 ZB per year by 2022, or 396 Exabytes (EB) per month. In 2017, it was only 1.5 ZB per year, or 122 EB per month. During the five years, global IP traffic will increase by 3.3 ZB, which contributes to a triple amount of growth. The global IP traffic will only continue to increase by a certain amount of number. Busy hour Internet traffic is now growing rapidly

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FEATURE than the average Internet traffic. Busy hour (or the busiest 60-minute period in a day) Internet traffic will increase by a factor of 4.8 between 2017 and 2022 and the average Internet traffic will increase by a factor of 3.7. IP traffic is growing the fastest in the Middle East and Africa at a CAGR of 41%, followed by Asia Pacific at a CAGR of 32 %, compared with the worldwide growth at a CAGR of 26%, between 2017 and 2022. IP traffic in Asia Pacific will reach 172.7 EB per month by 2022.

Hong Kong as the heart of Asia, is not only a major internet and transit hub in Asia Pacific region but also an international commercial hub among the world’s leading service-oriented economies. All the Over-the-top (OTT) players and leading internet backbone service providers have set their backbone PoPs in Hong Kong. In 2018, Google opened a new Google Cloud Platform (GCP) region in Hong Kong. In the meantime, Amazon also launched a new AWS Direct Connect Location in Hong Kong. The other OTT players have also established Hong Kong as one of their backbone nodes even earlier. Hong Kong will definitely contribute to and prepare for the high internet traffic growth in Asia Pacific.

Though I am not so assertive to say there is shortage on the supply of capacity across the Pacific Ocean, the shortage is true in specific routes or markets. It is even harder when we are considering the supply of large scale of capacity and diverse routes.

cable feature, PLDC can offer not only large scale capacity, but also a quick provision to meet customer’s needs.

PLCN will enrich the diversity for internet and cloud infrastructure across the Pacific. PLCN features the shortest route between Hong Kong and the US. Furthermore, PLDC will support the innovation in submarine cable industry and internet innovation in Hong Kong. Taking advantages of the open cable structure and the first application of C+L bands technology in PLCN, PLDC will cooperate with multiple manufacturers to demonstrate the open cable design, the innovation on L band, and the scalability from 100Gbps DWDM to 200G and even 400G over 13000km of ultra-long subsea environment. PLDC will facilitate innovative institutes in Hong Kong with sufficient trans-pacific bandwidth.

PLDC understands the challenges in the markets. Hence, PLDC designs various products such as full fiber pair, virtual fiber pair, spectrum, wavelength, private line and Ethernet private line in order to meet the flexible requirements from carriers, cloud providers, operators and enterprise customers.

PLDC has forecasted the surge of bandwidth requirement in Hong Kong several years ago and has created the PLCN project to connect Hong Kong and the US with huge capacity and low latency. Fortunately, PLCN is coming online soon. We are even happier to see that there are new projects following the initiatives of PLCN. With PLCN and other following projects, we are making Hong Kong a better international commercial hub and internet hub. STF

It can be forecasted that PLDC as the major investor, builder, owner and operator of the PLCN cable system will be one of the few providers capable of offering large scale capacity above 1Tbps connecting Hong Kong and the US within the next two to three years.

PLCN IS COMING TO FUEL THE MARKET

Now, PLCN is coming to fuel internet and cloud infrastructure connecting Hong Kong and across the Pacific Ocean. The launch of PLCN this year will make capacity planners more relaxed.

PLCN, the first submarine cable directly connecting Hong Kong to US, will provide a high-speed, low latency and high availability alternative to the markets. PLCN is able to supply large scale capacity up to 144Tbps across the Pacific. It can be forecasted that PLDC as the major investor, builder, owner and operator of the PLCN cable system will be one of the few providers capable of offering large scale capacity above 1Tbps connecting Hong Kong and the US within the next two to three years. With PLCN’s open

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WINSTON QIU is SVP of Pacific Light Data Communication (PLDC), which is the major investor, builder, owner and operator of the Pacific Light Cable Network (PLCN), the first submarine cable connecting Hong Kong and the US directly, featured with open cable architecture, ultra-high capacity and low latency.

Prior to PLDC, Winston was head of products and applications dept. in China Unicom Global. He joined China Unicom Group in 2008, being a leading network architect on global transmission and IP network, a strategic IP peering and procurement negotiator for China Unicom.

Prior to China Unicom, Winston served in China Network and China Telecom for 12 years.

Winston graduated from Beijing University of Posts & Telecommunications with a master’s degree on optical fiber communication system in 1996.

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FEATURE

OTEGLOBE:

The Enabler for New Interconnection Opportunities in Greece and the Mediterranean

BY PANAGIOTA BOSDOGIANNI

I

n today’s Internet, route and provider diversity, quality characteristics and security, are requirements that are mainly driven by content and cloud providers. Companies such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft are responsible for almost three quarters of the total international traffic growth. This trend, not only sets new rules for resiliency and redundancy, but also impacts the topology of networks as we know them today. The increased adoption of IoT, the need for faster decision making, the minimization of outages on major cloud providers, the evolvement of 5G and the growth of Machine to Machine communication, push OTTs and cloud providers to bring the intelligence of cloud services to the edge. New services and available computing resources on many of the connected devices, put more strict quality and security requirements on the network. The cloud should ensure proximity in order to achieve the minimum latency and jitter.

In the past, submarine cables landing in Europe were serving traffic aiming the main Western European hubs.

However, today’s explosion of demand for digital content in Africa, Middle East, and Asia means that European interconnection hubs should no longer be the only Points of Interconnection to reach the most popular content, since

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content providers will prefer to move this content to the Edge. For Europe this means moving closer to the landing stations of international cables. We have seen this happening already in Marseille, but starts to emerge in other areas with similar potential, like Athens, Greece.

The Mediterranean Sea is an area with traditionally strong presence of submarine cables. As expected, there are two types of submarine cables, mainly classified by their purpose and span: • Regional cables (with landing points mainly within the Mediterranean Sea). They are used to interconnect islands with the mainland, neighboring countries or Northern African/ Western Asian countries with the closest opposite country in Europe • Intercontinental cables (with landing points mostly outside Mediterranean Sea) that are used to interconnect Asia to Europe.

After nearly a decade of limited investment in submarine cables, the last few years have seen a market increase in the number of new cables all over the world, which is also reflected to the Mediterranean region, as depicted in the Figure below:

For the most recent intercontinental cables laid from 2010 onwards, there are three European countries used for Cable Landing Stations in the Mediterranean region, namely France, Italy and Greece.

Typically, it is of paramount importance to diversify the landing locations, so as to increase the overall network availability. In the same context, landing stations in Greece have the advantage of limiting the wet segment of intercontinental cables and avoiding the Sicilian Channel which is a narrow part of the Mediterranean prone to cuts. Further, connectivity from cable landing stations to inland neutral or OTT data centers (e.g in the area of Athens) is available over diverse, privately owned cables.

Further, Athens, based on its geographical advantage and the extensive terrestrial connectivity options towards the main European POPs (FLAP: Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam and Paris), can become a new and diverse hub for content delivery towards Northern Africa, the Gulf region, and Asia. The enabler for this, is OTEGLOBE’s network and what we offer as a turn-key solution include the following: • Required permits for Landing a Cable in Greece • Beach Manholes • Protected Land Routes from Beach Manholes to CLS and the relevant maintenance services • Collocation facilities and services in one of its Landing Stations.

As the leading Greek landing partner for potential new subsea cables, OTEGLOBE can prepare the landing station facilities according to customers’ system requirements, will operate the landing station on the Greek territory and provide backhaul services.

Consortium or Private cable owners can achieve an extremely quick and financially attractive access to Europe, considering that based on OTEGLOBE’s expertise, Landing and Operational Permits can be granted in less than 6 months, while based on the seabed, Direct Landing can be easily achieved. Furthermore, as MECMA’s latest report illustrates in the figure below, the Greek region is quite safe concerning cuts in submarine cables.

In addition to that, access to Europe through Greece is very robust, considering that OTEGLOBE owns and maintains more than 21.000 Km of fibre all over Europe, which represents one of its most strategic and high-value assets. It is one of the first and widest Pan-European backbone transport networks designed with ITU-T Flexible Grid Channel Plan, which is optimized for long-haul transport in terms of capacity and reach, via different combinations of modulation schemes. Currently, it can offer JANIUARY 2019 | ISSUE 104

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FEATURE an end-to-end design capacity up to 12.4Tbps, planned to be increased up to 18.4 Tbps using 8QAM modulation in high utilization links. All major service nodes are able to support 1.2Tbps line capacity per slot and up to 12Tbps of non-blocking switching capacity in a single rack. The figure below depicts the fact that the used capacity in OTEGLOBE’s network follows the global capacity growth trends.

Apart from the Western European hubs, recently new Eastern European hubs are emerging such as Bucharest (Romania) and Sofia (Bulgaria). They serve countries that are landlocked from the Mediterranean region and

OTEGLOBE’s unified optical multi terabit backbone network provides 4 diverse routes between Greece and Western Europe, via the Balkans or the Italian peninsula. Therefore, it reaches the full extent of the European digital production – FLAP.

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the intercontinental submarine cables but are reached via OTEGLOBE’s network and therefore have “on-net” access to our landing stations extending the interconnection opportunities in the greater Balkan region.

Similarly, carriers interested to serve areas adjacent to Greece, can benefit from the interconnect capabilities of OTEGLOBE through regional cables (e.g. the Silphium cable to Libya, which recently resumed operation after a suspension period due to Libya’s situation) or terrestrial interconnections to neighboring countries (e.g. Turkey, Albania, FYROM).

In general, the regional demand for bandwidth, the unique geographical location and the numerous existing submarine cable landing stations (SCLS) across the Greek seashore, combined with the presence of other submarine and overland cable systems for interconnection in conjunction with a fully liberalized regulatory framework, are the main advantages in selecting a Greek landing point for new submarine systems.

OTEGLOBE, is a signatory party of AAE-1 and SMW3 intercontinental cables with an active role in the design of the cables. Being a member of OTE Group, OTEGLOBE has gained valuable experience from the knowledge transfer from OTE who has been involved in the subsea cables for 50 years now, since 1969 when the first regional cable between Greece and Italy was laid. Since then, OTE has laid almost 4.000 km of subsea regional cables to interconnect the Ionian and Aegean islands.

Through the participation to AAE-1, OTEGLOBE brings to the market a completely new, alternative path for connecting Europe to Asia through Greece (Landing Station in Chania) and emerges as a reliable hub in the Mediterranean basin. OTEGLOBE can provide reliable interconnection from Athens though the AAE-1 cable to Singapore with roundtrip latency around 121 milliseconds, thus offering the best latency route from Europe to Singapore.

OTEGLOBE offers connectivity to the major cloud providers through its presence in the major datacenters in Europe, namely InterXion and Equinix and enables dedicated connectivity to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) via Google Cloud’s Partner Interconnect (GCI Partner).

Direct connectivity to major cloud providers, allows customers to bypass the public internet with highly reliable and secure paths. They could benefit of the global reach of our Network (including owned European network and submarine cables like AAE-1) beyond the Cloud Provider’s existing PoP locations and select bandwidth options to match their business needs without requiring the full capacity of Dedicated Interconnect.

OTEGLOBE’s fully programmable transport infrastructure combined with its flexible and uniform network architecture provide high-performance, secure, and flexible connections for enterprises and service providers while they also support automation and allow orchestration of new services. This is realized by OTEGLOBE’s network management system support of unified software-defined networking (SDN) control across all network elements via open application programming interfaces (APIs) for third party applications. This hybrid control approach that OTEGLOBE selected for its owned network using network’s management system in parallel with open, purpose-built and standards-based SDN control functions targets to provide a smooth environment for a step-by-step, non-disruptive for existing services migration to the new environment. Since AAE-1 is in essence a Third-Party Network, it additionally aims to provide an abstraction layer capable to seamlessly adapt in order to facilitate interoperability with other networks and support end-to-end service management that would allow realizing the full potential of SDN. To summarize, Athens, Greece emerges as the new hub in the Mediterranean region, offering unique advantages via OTEGLOBE’s submarine and terrestrial networks, and the new Landing capabilities. As part of its strategy, the last 5 years OTEGLOBE made substantial investments both in terrestrial and subsea networks adding more coverage and capacity to drive future growth and addressing the ever-increasing demand for high-speed services. With focus on customer experience we have put in place all the necessary procedures and mechanisms to achieve best in class delivery, prompt fault identification and resolution combined with transparent information flow to our customers with guaranteed Service Level Agreements. As a result of this strategy, we expect not only to maintain our leading position in Greece and the wider area of Southeast Europe but also to attract new subsea cable systems with the unique opportunities that Greece can offer. STF DR. PANAGIOTA BOSDOGIANNI holds the position of OTEGLOBE’s Technology Director since 2008. Her role includes network (voice + data) and technology planning, operations and continued evolution of platforms across OTEGLOBE’s network.

She joined OTEGLOBE in January 2001 as the company’s Network Planning Manager. She has also worked at the Network Planning Department of OTE since 1997. Prior to OTE group she had worked for the Hellenic Aerospace Industry S.A., and as a Visiting Professor at the Technical University of Crete.

Dr. Panagiota Bosdogianni has received her BSc. in Informatics from the University of Athens, her MSc in CIT from the University of Dundee, U.K., and her PhD in Electrical & Electronic Engineering from the University of Surrey, U.K. Dr. Bosdogianni has authored two books and various scientific publications.

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FEATURE

THE NEXT PHASE IN AFRICA’S TECHNICAL EVOLUTION

BY STEVE BRIGGS

T

he world has its eye on Africa. Called “The Dark Continent” and other not-particularly-flattering names in the past, Africa is now fully in the spotlight as an emerging economic force. With many established markets saturated, organisations, both abroad and originating on the continent, have noted predictions like McKinsey’s that consumer spending in Africa will reach $2.1 trillion by 2025. Combine that observation with another from the same study – that Africa’s young, growing and rapidly urbanising population will make up one-fifth of the world’s inhabitants by the same year – and the continent appears obviously loaded with opportunity.

It’s not just consumer businesses that have noticed the potential of Africa’s burgeoning educated and increasingly affluent middle classes. With a greater percentage of

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white-collar professionals bolstering local economies with their skills and ambitions – African tech start-ups raised $195 million in investment during 2017, up 51% from 2016, with ICT companies stepping up to encourage this growth.

Microsoft announced the opening of its first ever Azure data centres in Africa in mid-2018, advancing their investment in the continent after earlier setting up Microsoft ExpressRoute connections between Africa and Azure data centres in Europe. Named “South Africa North,” and centred in Johannesburg, as well as “South Africa West,” based in Cape Town, these first Azure global regions in Africa mark a significant milestone.

Amazon Web Services has also chosen South Africa as their springboard into African infrastructure investment, announcing plans for the AWS Africa (Cape Town) Re-

gion in the first half of 2020. This builds on existing South African AWS investments like a development centre, points of presence and the launch of AWS Direct Connect in 2017. Meanwhile, Google embarked on an African equivalent of its Google Developers’ Launchpad programme, and streaming content giant Netflix, already at home in South Africa since January 2016, has just announced its first original African series, Queen Sono.

WHAT’S REALLY NEXT FOR AFRICA?

Such high-profile investments in Africa from global connectivity, cloud and content providers leads to the important question: what does this all mean for the next phase of Africa’s technical evolution? What can we expect of Africa’s involvement in, and contribution to, the Fourth Industrial Revolution?

SEACOM has been in a privileged position to observe Africa’s flourishing in the Digital Age. Since launching the continent’s first broadband submarine cable along the eastern and southern coastlines in 2009, we’ve been speaking to and supporting businesses in the region, while participating in ICT industry and policy discussions. We’ve seen monopolies crumble, red tape falls away and opportunities increase in the sector.

Our simultaneous “big picture” and customer-centred perspectives have left us in a better position than most to comment on what’s coming to the continent. Overall, sentiment is positive, and both the local and international business communities have good reason to be optimistic.

This said, technical advances in Africa are expected to take time. Just like companies such as AWS have adopted a phased approach to their expansion into Africa, we can expect developments on the continent to be gradual before the area’s full potential, and contribution, is realised.

Good times lie ahead for Africa, definitely, but it’s important to remain realistic. The injection of capital into the region from world leaders in tech is a massive boost but even as connectivity continually improves, the continent is still playing catch-up with the rest of the world in terms of using digital solutions to advance businesses and economies. Locals must become comfortable with digital technologies and their adoption if that gap is to be bridged – and that will not happen overnight. Still, things are rapidly changing, and there is much to celebrate, even if cautiously.

SOUTH AFRICA AS A SPRINGBOARD TO FUTURE AFRICAN INVESTMENT

Looking at the major data centre announcements of 2018, it appears that South Africa is receiving the first wave

of African technology investments, with other Sub-Saharan economic centres, like Kenya and Nigeria, in close pursuit.

While it may appear unfair at first glance, it’s important to return to the point of cautious phased growth. Practically, South Africa is already best positioned to meet the demands, and provide the resources, which will ensure the reliability of data centres.

At SEACOM we’ve already seen evidence of growing demand across the Southern and Eastern regions of the continent. Through our work, supporting businesses in Kenya, we’ve witnessed a rapid uptake of cloud services in the region, arguably more so than in South Africa. Regardless, the hunger for data is becoming more ravenous continent-wide, and through strategic acquisitions and expansions, we’ve been increasing our capacity to more effectively meet it – hitting 1.5Tbs in 2018.

The most important take-home here is that the rest of Africa does still benefit from data centres located on the southern-most tip of the continent. Aligned with global trends to move data handling closer to the edge, cloud services that connect to data centres located in Africa will still be faster and more efficient than those relying on computing power from the other side of the planet.

WHAT LOCALISATION OF THE CLOUD MEANS IN AFRICA

The advantages of data localisation in Africa, thanks to data centres and servers opening on the continent, are honestly little different from elsewhere in the world.

From a service delivery perspective, the narrowing of distance between cloud processing power and end users means a decrease in latency, and a more seamless experience. While this improvement may be imperceptible for many businesses, in certain spheres a few milliseconds of lag does make a difference. Real-time, or near real-time, data transmission is a core requirement of Machine Learning, the Internet of Things and Digital Twin Technology.

The gathering and analysing of data remotely, enabled by sensors and cloud technologies, has huge efficiency-enhancing and cost-saving implications for Mining, Manufacturing and Agriculture, in particular. These spheres remain fundamental contributors to the economies of Africa.

Along with mobile-money-centred Fintech, and Healthtech, Agritech is an especially vibrant sector in Africa, with an increasing number of African startups using innovative emerging technologies to solve agricultural problems such as weather analysis, supply chain issues and the challenge of feeding exploding urban populations. Faster and more powerful processing on the African continent supports the development of these solutions, and reliable fibre-driven JANIUARY 2019 | ISSUE 104

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FEATURE

... the hunger for data is becoming more ravenous continent-wide, and through strategic acquisitions and expansions, we’ve been increasing our capacity to more effectively meet it – hitting 1.5Tbs in 2018.

interconnectivity with other countries allows these homegrown solutions to reach markets worldwide.

Business today is global, after all, and global ICT networks open doors to new opportunities for African organisations.

Localisation of the cloud in Africa also provides reassurances regarding legislative compliance and information security. Protection of data is becoming as much of a mandated concern on the continent as elsewhere, and data centres located within national boundaries or established trade territories mitigate these concerns. No longer is data exiting a country via the cloud to be processed and/or stored at an overseas facility. It seems highly likely that the “setting up shop” of notable content and cloud providers across the continent will make businesses more comfortable with the concept of migrating some, or all, of their business to the cloud. It will be interesting to see the actual spend of South African companies on cloud computing in 2018, as early in the year a World Wide Worx and F5 Networks report found that 83% of interviewed businesses intended to increase their cloud budgets.

OBSTACLES TO GROWTH

All the encouraging developments aside, it’s important to be realistic about Africa’s technical evolution. Looking at traditional obstacles to advancement, many are falling away. Markets are increasingly opening up, fibre access is slowly extending beyond urban centres to empower Africans in remote areas, and infrastructure limitations are being overcome (South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria all have international-standard, vendor-neutral data centres). There remain only two major barriers to Africa’s full emergence into the Digital Age. The first is the currency volatility of Africa’s economies, as so much technological infrastructure and service pricing is in US dollars.

A weakened exchange rate makes the adoption of these solutions significantly harder.

The second, and by far the biggest issue, is a glaring skills shortage. Digital economies require a workforce equipped with digital skills, and here Africa is lagging. On one level, African businesses need technology partners and providers who can help them integrate their existing systems with cloud solutions, and Africa, to date, lacks the support environment that mature economies have.

On another level, Africa is particularly vulnerable to the narrative that AI and other emerging technologies will lead to job losses. This mindset could easily transform into resistance to cloud adoption at a social and governmental level. Fortunately, the situation in the Silicon Savannah of

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Nairobi shows these fears are unfounded. Thousands of digital-savvy young Kenyans are employed in data capture and interpretation roles, distilling outsourced information from international markets for AI analysis, and programming the intelligence of machines to complete tasks.

To ensure Africa’s future workers are employable in the digital economy, governments, schools and private enterprises need to work together to prioritise STEM learning and ensure everyone who leaves their country’s education system is digitally literate and has basic coding skills. Not only does this approach help create more job opportunities at an individual level, but it also bolsters the greater economy.

ENTHUSIASM AND OPTIMISM

Despite the risks and shortfalls, African businesses are increasingly interested in, and are adopting cloud technologies as part of their growth plans. Massive international cloud and content providers putting down roots in Africa may not be a panacea to the continent’s problems, but it is a powerful sign of the world showing confidence in the region – and locals are rightfully feeding off the positivity.

Unburdened with entrenched legacy systems in many cases, African enterprises are well-positioned to explore the potential that the cloud and other emerging technologies unlock. The next likely phase in Africa’s technical evolution will be an explosion of solutions by Africans for Africans and the world, with the continent making high-value social and economic contributions at a global level. SEACOM is proud to support this growth, enabling the connectivity that underpins these digital technologies while educating businesses about the transformative capabilities of cloud, and other solutions for their operations. STF As Chief Commercial Officer at SEACOM, STEVE BRIGGS oversees sales performance, helps to optimise the product portfolio and drives superior customer experiences across the company’s commercial portfolio. Prior to joining SEACOM, Briggs was Executive Head: Online and Self Service Products and Operations at Vodacom.

Briggs has more than a decade of experience in the telecoms sector, co-founding BizCall in 2005 (acquired by Vox Telecom in 2006) and ARC Telecoms in 2010 (acquired by Jasco Electronics in 2012). Ahead of joining Vodacom in 2014, Steve held several positions at Jasco Group, most recently serving as Managing Director of Jasco Enterprise Before moving into the telecoms industry, Steve held a range of senior positions at Standard Bank Group. He holds a B.Com (Economics) from University of Port Elizabeth, a B.Com Honours (Economics) from Unisa and an MBA from the University of the Witwatersrand.

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BACK REFLECTION

THE MEN WHO FIRST WIRED THE WORLD

BY STEWART ASH AND BILL BURNS

T

his Issue of SubTel Forum is dedicated to ‘Global Outlook’ and there can be nothing more global in outlook than the Internet. In today’s world we have almost instant access to a wealth of information through our laptops, mobile phones, personal computers and tablets. Yet, apart from the readers of SubTel Forum, very few people know why, or even care how this is possible. As with all utilities, they just expect it to be there, and complain when it isn’t! If you ask them how this access is achieved the majority will say, “It’s all done through satellites isn’t it?” As we know, nothing could be further from the truth. Access to the World Wide Web is, in fact, only possible thanks to a vast global network of fibre optic cables that carry terabits/petabits of data under the oceans. These cables are the arteries of the Internet, enabling e-commerce and shaping social media. Loss of internet access can quite literally bring the economies of some countries to a complete standstill. Therefore, submarine cables are arguably the most important technology in modern society.

This unheralded industry did not spring up overnight; it took more than one hundred and sixty-seven years of development to bring us to the telecommunications environment that we enjoy today. In the Victorian era, pioneering businessmen, engineers, scientists and sea captains came forward and laid down the foundations of an industry that has provided the

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world with high-quality, reliable telecommunications ever since. Although it is generally accepted that our industry began with the laying of the first cable across the English Channel, by the steam tug Goliath on 28 August 1850, this cable was not fit for purpose and was probably only laid to ensure that the Brett brothers, John Watkins (1805-63) and Jacob (1809-97), could retain their monopoly landing licence that they had negotiated with the French Government. It is perhaps more accurate to say that the industry began the following year, when Glass,

The 1851 Cable in the Factory

Elliot & Co made the last 5nm of the first successful cable, which was laid between Dover and Calais. This short length of cable was made at its Morden Wharf factory on the Greenwich Peninsula.

THE 1851 CABLE IN THE FACTORY

The cable provided a reliable service between London and Paris, and for the first time the prices on the London Stock Exchange could be seen on the Paris Bourse the same day.

This changed the way international business was conducted and similar

short distance cables were soon under construction. Minds on both sides of the Atlantic quickly turned to the possibility of a trans-Atlantic cable, and the well-known saga of the Atlantic Telegraph began in 1854. Glass, Elliot was a major part of this story, and to accommodate the increased cable production necessary, it expanded its facilities by acquiring the 14-acre site of the derelict Enderby Hemp & Rope works, upstream from Morden Wharf.

As is well known, the Atlantic Telegraph was ultimately successful, and over the next forty years the submarine telegraph cable network would encircle the globe. This was very much a British initiative, with the vast majority of cables being made in factories on the River Thames. The only manufacturer of cable north of the Thames was R S Newall & Co and they went out of business in 1870. These were the cable companies with factories on the Thames: Hooper’s Telegraph Works; the India Rubber, Gutta Percha & Telegraph Works Co; W T Henley & Co; Siemens Brothers; and the industry leader, the Telegraph Construction & Maintenance Co (Telcon), formed by the merger of Glass, Elliot and the Gutta Percha Co. This global network of cable was built, in the most part, by private enterprise with very little government support, due in large part to the vision, business skills and tenacity of two giants of the Victorian Era, Daniel Gooch (1816-1889) Baronet and Sir John Pender (1816-1896) GCMG. They were the architects of a network of submarine telegraph cables that they built together, creating what Tom

Standage has dubbed ‘The Victorian Internet’. Both these men deserve to be recognised alongside Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806-59) and George Stephenson (1781-1848), not only for their pivotal contribution to the Atlantic Telegraph but their vision of global communications that benefited society as a whole and facilitated the expansion of the British Empire.

John Pender

Daniel Gooch

Daniel Gooch was the son of an iron founder, born in Bedington Northumberland. In 1831 his family moved to the Tredegar Ironworks in Monmouthshire, where Daniel received his early education in pioneering steam railway locomotion, under the guidance, for a short period, of Richard Trevithick (1771-1832). He then trained with several companies, including Robert Stephenson & Co in Newcastle Upon Tyne, until being recruited by Brunel in 1837 as a draughtsman for the Great Western Railway (GWR). Gooch is probably best remembered for his association with Brunel, both for his work on the GWR, which he carried on long after Brunel’s death, and as Brunel’s assistant in the construction of the SS Great Eastern. Much less is known about his exploits in submarine telegraphy.

John Pender was born in Bonhill, West Dunbartonshire, where his father James had moved the family to take up work in one of the many calico printing factories that were springing up in the Vale of Leven at that time.

James’ career flourished, and in 1824 he moved the family to the Gorbals, at that time an up-market suburb of Glasgow. In Glasgow he opened his own business, James Pender & Co Calico Printers. John was educated at the village school in Bonhill and then Glasgow High School, leaving at the age of fourteen to become an apprentice ‘Pattern Maker’ in one of the larger factories in Bonhill; probably Croftengea. This was one of the highest-paid artisan jobs in the industry at that time, but Pender rose quickly, taking on a management role, and by the time he was twenty-one he had become the factory manager.

In 1840, John Pender married Marion Cairns (1819-41), the daughter of a Glasgow merchant tailor and they were soon blessed with a son, James (1841-1921), but tragically, Marion died three months later on her 22nd birthday. Her demise followed shortly after the death of John’s elder brother, James (1808-1841), who succumbed to tropical fever while in Hispaniola.

The death of his wife and elder brother affected John profoundly. He threw himself into his work, selling the company’s products to Manchester, which was the centre of the growing export trade to China and India. In the process, he made the factory owners very rich men. In 1843, he decided to strike out on his own, and at the beginning of 1844 he moved south to ManchesJANIUARY 2019 | ISSUE 104

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BACK REFLECTION ter and set up his own business, John Pender & Co, Commission Agents.

In addition to his export business, he traded the base material, called ‘grey cloth’, between the manufacturers, bleachers and printers, earning commission on each transaction. At that time, this middleman role was an unusual and niche market, in which Pender made a lot of money very quickly, and he soon became a highly respected merchant on the Manchester

The SS Great Eastern Laying the Atlantic Telegraph

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Cotton Exchange In 1851, Pender married Emma Denison (1816-1890), the daughter of a Liverpool attorney-at-law and an heiress to the Daybrook estate in Nottingham. Up to this point John’s entire fortune had been tied up in the textiles industry, and it was Emma that encouraged him to diversify his portfolio. Because of this, when the Liverpool-based Magnetic Telegraph Co needed new capital to lay a cable

across the Irish Sea, it re-formed as the English & Irish Magnetic Co to invited additional investment, and John Pender made a large stock purchase. He was invited to join the board, and as was his practice, he looked deeply into the company’s affairs, following closely the installation of the Irish Sea cable. It was this project that triggered his life-long commitment to submarine cables. It was also at this time that Pender first

encountered the Magnetic’s chief engineer, Charles Tilston Bright (183288). In 1857, John Pender was instrumental in a merger that formed the British & Irish Magnetic Telegraph Co, becoming its first chairman. This company would provide the vital link between London and the west coast of Ireland for the Atlantic Telegraph.

When Brett, Bright and Cyrus W Field (1819-92) came to Manchester in 1854 to raise capital for the Atlantic Telegraph Co, John Pender was one of the first to invest £1,000, and he urged other Manchester businessmen to invest too, helping greatly in raising the required £350K. For this he was invited to join the board of directors.

However, he did not take an active role in the 1857 and 1858 attempts, and after the 1858 failure he resigned his directorship to concentrate on his textiles business, the Lancashire cotton famine, and his wife’s declining health. In 1861, the report of the Joint Committee appointed by the Lords of the Committee of Privy Council for Trade and the Atlantic Telegraph Co to inquire into the Construction of Submarine Telegraph Cables demonstrated that an Atlantic Telegraph was technically possible, but there was little appetite for such a project in England and due to the American Civil War (1861-65), no investment could be expected from the USA. Cyrus Field continued to pursue the dream, and when John Watkins Brett died in 1863, Field turned to Pender to take over the lead role with the British investors, inviting him to rejoin the board of the Atlantic Telegraph Co. It was Richard Atwood

Eastern Telegraph Map 1901

It is not clear when Gooch and Pender first encountered one another, but from 1864 onwards they were the driving forces behind the =Atlantic Telegraph.

Glass (1829-73), Managing Director of Glass, Elliot who came up with the idea that if an Atlantic Telegraph was to be successful it would need one company to be responsible for all aspects of the project; however, he was not able to achieve this. Field took the idea to Pender, who undertook

the task of merging the Gutta Percha Co with Glass, Elliot & Co to form the Telegraph Construction & Maintenance Co (Telcon). To convince the directors of these two companies, Pender put up a personal guarantee of £250K and became its first chairman, while Daniel Gooch was appointed as the company’s chief engineer. It is not clear when Gooch and Pender first encountered one another, but from 1864 onwards they were the driving forces behind the Atlantic Telegraph.

It was Gooch that acquired the SS Great Eastern, with the assistance of Pender and Thomas Brassey (1805-70), setting up the Great Eastern SteamJANIUARY 2019 | ISSUE 104

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BACK REFLECTION Lay Lines Panels

ship Co and converting the ship for cable work. It was John Pender who personally obtained the services of James Anderson (1824- 93) from Cunard to be the ship’s captain. Gooch sailed on the 1865 lay and when it failed, just short of Newfoundland, he wrote to a friend to say he was convinced that they would complete the task the following year. However, the Atlantic Telegraph Co was unable to raise more funding and it was Gooch and Pender that launched the Anglo-American Telegraph Co, raising £650K of new capital and personally investing £10,000 each.

As is well known, the 1866 lay was a success and the abandoned 1865 cable was also completed. For this momentous achievement, six of the leading projectors were reward with honours

by Queen Victoria (1819-1901). For his outstanding contribution, Daniel Gooch was created Baronet of Clewer Park, but despite having done more than any other individual to secure the success of the Atlantic Telegraph, John Pender was overlooked. Why this should have happened is a story for another time.

In February 1868, on medical advice, Edward George Geoffrey

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Smith-Stanley (1799-1869), 14th Earl of Derby, stood down as Prime Minister and was replaced by the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Benjamin Disraeli (1804-81). One of the first pieces of legislation that Disraeli tabled was the 1868 Telegraph Act, which enabled the General Post Office to buy out all the private terrestrial telegraph companies and run them itself. While the Bill was still at the committee stage, Pender resigned as chairman and sold all his shares in the British & Irish Magnetic Telegraph Co, before they could be compulsorily purchased. He then stood down as chairman of Telcon in favour of Gooch, but retained his large stock holding in the company. He then set about his vision of building a global network of submarine cables, opening services to India (1870), Australia (1872), China (1872), New Zealand (1876), the east coast of South America (1874-78), the east coast of Africa (1880-92), the west coast of Africa (1885-89), and finally the west coast of South America in 1892.

Pender and Gooch worked closely together, with each taking the lead in promoting different cable projects, negotiating landing rights and subsi-

dies, arranging finance and obtaining private investment. Pender’s approach was to establish a limited company for each section of a route, in order to mitigate the financial exposure. Then once the systems were in service, he would consolidate these companies into larger entities. Over the next two decades Pender and Gooch used a similar business model to build their global network. In each case, Pender would establish the operating company and the supply contract would be given to Telcon, except where there were strategic reasons not to do so. In most of these cases, Telcon was given the main contract and it subcontracted the work to another supplier. On several projects Telcon would take an initial equity stake in the system, which Pender’s operating company would later buy out. Because of this strategy their companies prospered. Pender’s federation of companies became The Eastern & Associated Telegraph Companies, the largest international telegraph company in the world, and Telcon became the industry’s leading supplier of submarine cable, controlling over 80% of the market.

When Daniel Gooch died in 1889, this friendship and lucrative partnership came to an end, so Pender used his stock holding in Telcon to have his son James James Pender elected to the Telcon board of directors in order to retain the family influence.

After John Pender’s death, the world was finally encircled with submarine telegraph cables when in 1901 Telcon manufactured and installed a telegraph cable across the Pacific from Australia to Canada.

The vast majority of these cables were manufactured at the Enderby Wharf factory, named after the Enderby family that ran the Hemp & Rope Works (See Issue 81 March 2015). Some readers may remember that ASN sold the river frontage of this factory site in 2008, and from 2013, Barratt of London have been carrying out a major housing development there. This has now been completed, with the Grade II listed building, Enderby House, having been refurbished with a new extension added. The current planning is that this will become a ‘Gastro Pub’ run by Young’s Brewery. In addition, Barratt was required by the Council of the Royal Borough of Greenwich to invest in a public art installation that recognizes and commemorates the history of this internationally significant site.

The art installation is called ‘Lay Lines’ and comprises three ceramic panels which show the greatly magnified detailed cross-sectional images of three different cable designs. These represent the three eras of submarine system transmission technology: 1850-1950 – The Telegraph Era 1950-1986 – The Telephone Era 1986-Today – The Optical Fibre Era In addition, there are three concrete sculptures set on different terrace levels. Each sculpture is inspired by the cross-sections of these cables. On

the side wall there is a QR Tag which links to a web page https://enderbywharf.wordpress.com/sculpturelay-lines/ where you can find more detail about the cable designs, the history of their manufacture at Enderby Wharf, and what inspired local artist Bobby Lloyd to create the sculptures.

If I have whetted your appetite to learn more about these remarkable men and the global network they built, you may be interested in my biography of John Pender, The Cable King, which is available from Amazon. STF Since graduating in 1970, STEWART ASH has spent his entire career in the submarine cable industry. He joined STC Submarine Systems as a development engineer, working on coaxial transmission equipment development and submarine repeater design. He then transferred onto field engineering, installing coaxial submarine cable systems around the world, finally attaining the role

of Shipboard Installation Manager. In 1986, Stewart set up a new installation division to install fibre optic submarine systems. In 1993, he joined Cable & Wireless Marine, as a business development manager and then move to an account director role responsible the parent company, C&W. When Cable & Wireless Marine became Global Marine Systems Ltd in 1999, he became General Manager of the engineering and training division, responsible for fault investigation, jointing technology, system testing and ROV operation. As part of this role he was chairman of the UJ Consortium. He left Global Marine in 2005 to become an independent consultant. In this role he has assisted system purchasers and owners in all aspects of system procurement, operations, maintenance and repair.

Stewart’s interest in the history of submarine cables began in 2000, when he project managed a celebration of the 150th anniversary of the submarine cable industry. As part of this project he co-authored and edited From Elektron to ‘e’ Commerce.

Since then he has written and lectured extensively on the history of the submarine cable industry. In 2013 he was invited to contribute the opening chapter to Submarine Cables: The Handbook of Law and Policy, which covered the early development of the submarine cable industry. To support the campaign to save Enderby House—a Grade II listed building—from demolition, in 2015 he wrote two books about the history of the Telcon site at Enderby Wharf on the Greenwich Peninsula in London. The first was The Story of Subsea Telecommunications and its Association with Enderby House, and the second was The Eponymous Enderbys of Greenwich. From March 2009 to November 2015 he wrote the Back Reflection articles. After that he set about writing a biography of Sir John Pender GCMG ‘The Cable King’ which was published by Amazon in April 2018.

BILL BURNS is an English electronics engineer who worked for the BBC in London before moving to New York in 1971.

There he spent a number of years in the high-end audio industry, writing equipment reviews and magazine articles on technical subjects. His research for these led to an interest in the history of communications, and in 1994 a chance find of a section of the 1857 Atlantic cable inspired him to set up the Atlantic Cable website - http://atlantic-cable.com. The site now has over a thousand pages on all aspects of undersea communications from 1850 until the present, and Bill’s research into cable history has taken him to all of the surviving telegraph cable stations around the world, and to archives and museums in North America and Europe.

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Undersea Fiber Commu r Communication Undersea Systems, Fiber 2eComm This comprehensive book provides both a

high-level overview of submarine Edited by: José Independent T nt submarine Edited Telecom by: Chesnoy José Expert, Chesnoy former Independent CTOsystems ofsubmarine Alcatel-Luc submar and theNetworks detailed specialist technical Submarine data Submari for N Submarine the design, installation, repair, and all other aspects of this field.

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FROM THE

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE

THREE MONTHS AND COUNTING:

Highlights of an Exceptional SubOptic 2019 Conference Ahead

BY STUART BARNES

Stuart Barnes Programme Chair

F

irstly, Happy New Year. 2019 is another major year for the submarine industry and SubOptic in particular. As Chairman of the Programme Committee I have been working with the team to provide a memorable conference in New Orleans in April.

In a departure from previous events we have injected some new elements to the programme in order to underpin two major themes - Diversity and Global Reach.

Here are some of the highlights of the SubOptic 2019 programme: • First and most importantly, we have not altered the highly successful body of the conference content, the papers and posters. SubOptic is the only conference that offers broad, original and relevant technical content attracting contemporary inputs on topics ranging from legal and regulatory through marine to the highly scientific issues currently affecting our industry. We have created three parallel tracks throughout the conference to accommodate the unprecedented response, with more than 90 Oral Presentations and 45

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SUBMARINE TELECOMS MAGAZINE

Posters. What is greatly encouraging is that there are more papers than ever from further afield globally and I have to thank our Regional Ambassadors for this as well as the marvellous Papers Committee.

• We have reinforced our Masterclass content and for the first time ever we are able, thanks to our event organisers STF, to offer Continuing Education Units to attendees of these sessions. We would like to encourage our major supporters to consider sending some of their younger talent to the conference to experience the buzz of our industry and earn some CEU merits.

• As a major departure from previous SubOptic conferences we have made significant space for Round Tables. The Round Table Topics

have been especially chosen with the hope that some of these will evolve into post Conference Working Groups, thus building the overall aim of our organisation to make SubOptic more and more relevant than just a 3 yearly gathering • And the SubOptic Association has already created two working groups. One on Open Cables (led

by Elizabeth Rivera Hartling) and one on Professional Opportunities / Diversity / Inclusion (led by Amy Marks). Both these will be showcased on Monday in dedicated sessions for the working groups to present their work, foster debate and further the discussion.

• We have two excellent Panel Discussions chaired by Ed McCormack and Keith Schofield. Ed has assem-

bled a group of industry leaders who will address some of the challenges we will face in the near future. As these issues are global in nature Ed will draw on his relationships from around the world. In his panel Keith will address one of the most important topics that our industry has faced in recent years, the plans for the UN to have a stronger say in the regulation of maritime activities in waters beyond national territorial limits.

These issues will have profound effects on permitting for example.

Keith is convening a panel to address both sides of the issue.

• In an addition to the standard Exhibition that will run continuously throughout the Conference we will for the first time have space at the event for small enterprises to exhibit their wares at a Table Top Small Business Exhibition on the final day. As we all know our industry is underpinned by a large number of small entities who provide valuable specialised services, ranging from legal through permitting and many different types of marine support activities, often too small to warrant a full-on exhibition booth.

• We have been fortunate to find three stimulating Keynote speakers, who will kick off each of the 3 formal days. Gary Smith will start the proceedings. As CEO of our host Ciena and a leading CEO in Telecommunications he will surely be able to provide an up to date view

on our Business and its wider global perspective. This will be followed on Day 2 with an equally relevant view on Cyber Security from Amber Case who describes herself intriguingly as a ‘Cyborg Anthropologist’. Finally, we are privileged to have Vinton Cerf address us. Widely recognised as one of the founding Fathers of the Internet he gives hugely thought-provoking observations on the subject and its relevance to today’s and ever-changing world.

• An exciting new App. Our state-ofthe-art event App enables SubOptic 2019 attendees to be informed at all times. The extensive set of networking features enables attendees to use the mobile event app to connect with their peers, as well as help programme planners better understand what they value the most. From a list of sessions with speaker biographies, to matchmaking, live polling & attendee messaging; the SubOptic 2019 mobile event App has it all.

• And finally, we have selected New Orleans for the event. SubOptic is famous for its networking opportunities and New Orleans presents a great environment to wind down in the evening with friends and colleagues from around the world. Our highlight will be the Mardi Gras Dinner at Antoine’s, preceded by a Float Parade from the Marriott Hotel.

• Along with those mentioned above you will also gather from the recent EBlast that we have encouraged many

industry leaders to chair round tables and give papers. Come and hear Steve Grubb, Gabriel Charlet, Priyanth Mehta, Hiroshi Nakamoto, Valey Kamalov, Simon Webster, Tony Frisch and many more discuss the big issues…

SubOptic is Your Event. We believe that we have put together a conference that will enable you to fully understand the most relevant topics our industry is facing today whether they be purely technical or major legislative concerns.

Not only do we hope that you attend in April, but in immersing yourself in the event assist the SubOptic organisation in increasing its value to your business today and tomorrow. STF STUART BARNES gained an Honours Degree and PhD from London University. He has been an engineer and manager with 40 years experience in telecommunications, of which 30 years has been in submarine systems. His career spans the last years of analogue technology through to the latest coherent optical systems. He has been actively involved with all 3 phases of ownership starting with PTT ’s, through Carriers Carrier through to today’s OTT era. Starting as a research engineer, he was privileged to be involved in the first regenerative optical systems in both cable and repeater design.

Then as Technical Director of STC he led the development of ASN’s new repeater and PFE (both in use today) and first WDM SLTE. In subsequent years he has been was involved in both new SLTE developments with Azea Networks and repeater developments with Xtera Communications Inc. He has attended the majority of SubOptic events since the inception, both authoring and sponsoring many publications. He was Chair of the Papers Committee when SubOptic was held in San Francisco and was an active participant in Dubai, helping Elaine Stafford prepare the closing ceremony. He was Visiting Professor of Electrical Engineering at Southampton University and Advisor to the School of Photonics at Aston University.

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FEATURE

PROGRAM // MONDAY

08:00 - 08:45 08:45 - 09:00 09:00 - 09:15 09:15 - 09:30 09:30 - 09:45 09:45 - 10:00 10:00 - 10:15 10:15 - 10:30 10:30 - 10:45 10:45 - 11:00 11:00 - 11:15 11:15 - 11:30 11:30 - 11:45 11:45 - 12:00 12:00 - 12:15 12:15 - 12:30 12:30 - 12:45 12:45 - 13:00 13:00 - 13:15 13:15 - 13:30 13:30 - 13:45 13:45 - 14:00 14:00 - 14:15 14:15 - 14:30 14:30 - 14:45 14:45 - 15:00 15:00 - 15:15 15:15 - 15:30 15:30 - 15:45 15:45 - 16:00 16:00 - 16:15 16:15 - 16:30 16:30 - 16:45 16:45 - 17:00 17:00 - 17:15 17:15 - 17:30 17:30 - 17:45 17:45 - 18:00 18:00 - 18:15 18:15 - 18:30 18:30 - 18:45 18:45 - 19:00 19:00 - 19:15 19:15 - 19:30 19:30 - 19:45 19:45 - 20:00

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REGISTRATION 08:00 - 19:00 OPEN CABLES SUBOPTIC ASSOCIATION WORKING GROUP UPDATE BREAK EXHIBITOR MOVE IN

MASTERCLASS 1 MASTERCLASS 2 Principles of Offshore Oil Open Submarine Networks & Gas Submarine Telecoms LUNCH & LEARN Professional Opportunities / Diversity / Inclusion SubOptic Association Working Group Update MASTERCLASS 3 Advancements in Marine Installation & Maintenance

MASTERCLASS 4 Updates to Transmission Technology BREAK

MASTERCLASS 5 Legal & Regulatory Developments

MASTERCLASS 6 Wet Plant Design & Qualification

SUBOPTIC ASSOCIATION MEMBER’S EVENT

EXHIBITION

SUBOPTIC 2019 WELCOME RECEPTION

PROGRAM // TUESDAY - 08:45 BY 08:00 KIERAN CLARK 08:45 - 09:00 09:00 - 09:15 09:15 - 09:30 09:30 - 09:45 09:45 - 10:00 10:00 - 10:15 10:15 - 10:30 10:30 - 10:45 10:45 - 11:00 11:00 - 11:15 11:15 - 11:30 11:30 - 11:45 11:45 - 12:00 12:00 - 12:15 12:15 - 12:30 12:30 - 12:45 12:45 - 13:00 13:00 - 13:15 13:15 - 13:30 13:30 - 13:45 13:45 - 14:00 14:00 - 14:15 14:15 - 14:30 14:30 - 14:45 14:45 - 15:00 15:00 - 15:15 15:15 - 15:30 15:30 - 15:45 15:45 - 16:00 16:00 - 16:15 16:15 - 16:30 16:30 - 16:45 16:45 - 17:00 17:00 - 17:15 17:15 - 17:30 17:30 - 17:45 17:45 - 18:00 18:00 - 18:15 18:15 - 18:30

REGISTRATION 08:00 - 18:30 OPENING CEREMONY KEYNOTE 1 - GARY SMITH, PRESIDENT & CEO, CIENA BREAK NETWORKS OF THE FUTURE OP-1

GLOBAL CITIZEN OP-2

MARINE ADVANCEMENTS OP-3

LUNCH - CARONDELET

EXHIBITION

PANEL 1 INDUSTRY LEADER’S FORUM

OIL & GAS AND SPECIAL MARKETS OP-4

BREAK REGULATORY, LEGAL & SECURITY OP-5

WET TECHNOLOGY OP-6

DRY TECHNOLOGY OP-7

POSTER SESSION & RECEPTION

JANIUARY 2019 | ISSUE 104

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FEATURE 08:00 - 08:45 08:45 - 09:00 09:00 - 09:15 09:15 - 09:30 09:30 - 09:45 09:45 - 10:00 10:00 - 10:15 10:15 - 10:30 10:30 - 10:45 10:45 - 11:00 11:00 - 11:15 11:15 - 11:30 11:30 - 11:45 11:45 - 12:00 12:00 - 12:15 12:15 - 12:30 12:30 - 12:45 12:45 - 13:00 13:00 - 13:15 13:15 - 13:30 13:30 - 13:45 13:45 - 14:00 14:00 - 14:15 14:15 - 14:30 14:30 - 14:45 14:45 - 15:00 15:00 - 15:15 15:15 - 15:30 15:30 - 15:45 15:45 - 16:00 16:00 - 16:15 16:15 - 16:30 16:30 - 16:45 16:45 - 17:00 17:00 - 17:15 17:15 - 17:30 17:30 - 17:45 17:45 - 18:00 18:00 - 18:15 18:15 - 18:30 18:30 - 18:45 18:45 - 19:00 19:00 - 19:15 19:15 - 19:30 19:30 - 22:00

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PROGRAM // WEDNESDAY REGISTRATION 08:00 - 17:30 KEYNOTE 2 AMBER CASE, CYBORG ANTHROPOLOGIST

INDUSTRY UPDATE (TELEGEOGRAPHY) BREAK NETWORKS OF THE FUTURE OP-8

MARINE ADVANCEMENTS OP-9

WET TECHNOLOGY OP-10

LUNCH

EXHIBITION

SUBMARINE TELECOMS MAGAZINE

COMMERCIAL & FUNDING OP-11

NETWORKS OF THE FUTURE OP-12

DRY TECHNOLOGY OP-13

BREAK

ROUND TABLE DISCUSSIONS

MARDI GRAS RECEPTION, PROCESSIONAL PARADE BEGINS 18:00

MARDI GRAS GALA DINNER AT ANTOINE’S RESTAURANT

PROGRAM // THURSDAY

BY KIERAN CLARK 08:00 - 08:45

REGISTRATION 08:00 - 13:00

08:45 - 09:00 09:00 - 09:15 09:15 - 09:30 09:30 - 09:45 09:45 - 10:00 10:00 - 10:15 10:15 - 10:30 10:30 - 10:45 10:45 - 11:00 11:00 - 11:15 11:15 - 11:30 11:30 - 11:45 11:45 - 12:00 12:00 - 12:15 12:15 - 12:30 12:30 - 12:45 12:45 - 13:00 13:00 - 13:15 13:15 - 13:30 13:30 - 13:45 13:45 - 14:00 14:00 - 14:15 14:15 - 14:30 14:30 - 14:45 14:45 - 15:00 15:00 - 15:15 15:15 - 15:30 15:30 - 15:45 15:45 - 16:00 16:00 - 16:15 16:15 - 16:30 16:30 - 16:45 16:45 - 17:00 17:00 - 17:15 17:15 - 17:30

WET TECHNOLOGY OP-14

REGULATORY LEGAL & SECURITY OP-16

GLOBAL CITIZEN OP-15 BREAK

NETWORKS OF THE FUTURE OP-17

OIL & GAS AND SPECIAL MARKETS OP-19

WET TECHNOLOGY OP-18

EXHIBITION

LUNCH BREAK KEYNOTE 3 VINTON CERF, GOOGLE PANEL 2 UNCLOS BBNJ BY ICPC

SMALL BUSINESS NETWORKING RECEPTION

EXHIBITOR MOVE-OUT

CLOSING CEREMONY - MARDI GRAS

JANIUARY 2019 | ISSUE 104

61

FROM THE

CONFERENCE DIRECTOR

TEMPUS FUGIT - TIME SURE HAS FLOWN BY I

t seems like yesterday we were just announcing that SubOptic 2019 would be held in New Orleans, Louisiana. It’s hard to believe that we are now just under 90 days from the premier international submarine telecommunications conference. The SubOptic 2019 Program Committee has been hard at work making this another SubOptic you can’t miss. Remember to register this month before the rate changes. It’s still possible to save $100.00 on your Conference registration fee by reserving your hotel at the same time. Following registration you will be sent a link to download the SubOptic 2019 Conference App. The SubOptic 2019 Conference App is the ideal companion for attendees. It improves your overall experience by facilitating and simplifying the exchange of information at SubOptic. The Conference App has it all – from a list of sessions with speaker profiles, to matchmaking, live polling and attendee messaging.

One of the key elements will be the integration of the App with your

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SUBMARINE TELECOMS MAGAZINE

Chris Noyes Conference Director STF Events

the option to include polling voting name-badge SmartTag. The Smartand electronic Q&A as part of their Tags are Bluetooth enabled devices presentation. These added features that are attached to your conference name-badge enabling you to exchange allow the presenters to create a more information from your completed pro- interactive and engaging session. The App will also allow you to give feedfile with other attendees. Used with back on each of the presenters and the the SmartTag, the App will email session anonymously. you a list of new connections that You must be registered to use you have made every day. The device the Conference App. Once you are can also be used to collect marketing registered you will receive an email to materials, and all activity is recorded download it. The App is available in as part of the full attendee “journey” the Apple and Google stores. Once of the event. installed on your device or devices – it The App will also have a peris tablet compatible – please log-in sonalized calendar function which and update your user profile for easier allows you to create an individual networking during the conference. schedule for the conference. You can Your login credentials are the email add sessions and set meetings with address used during registration, and other attendees or with sponsors and exhibitors. By adding the sessions the password will be emailed to you by to your calendar the end of January. STF you are also able to download the The Conference App has it presentations all – from a list of sessions for each of the with speaker profiles, to sessions, as well as take notes on your matchmaking, live polling and mobile device. attendee messaging.

Presenters have

8-11 April 2019 | Â New Orleans Marriott, New Orleans, LA

Engage with the PREMIER EVENT OF 2019 www.suboptic2019.com

Connect with us! Click FOLLOW LinkedIn www.linkedin.com/company/suboptic-conference/ FaceBook www.facebook.com/SubOpticCon/ Twitter twitter.com/SubOpticCon Instagram www.instagram.com/subopticcon/

Share a Post Click share at the bottom of a SubOptic post so that your connections, friends and colleagues can share in your excitement for the 2019 event.

Tag SubOptic 2019 Tag SubOptic by using the @ symbol when you are commenting or posting.

Comment on Posts Your opinion matters and potential attendees want to hear from you prior to the event.. Comment on posts and start a discussion.

Engage fellow members of the subsea telecommunications industry to spread the word about the event, the opportunity to submit an abstract and the chance to be part of an event that is 2019 | ISSUE 1041 JANIUARY advancing the industry through its connections.

SUBMARINE CABLE

NEWS

CONFERENCES & ASSOCIATIONS

NOW FUTURE SYSTEMS

ICPC Celebrates Its 60th Anniversary in Cable Protection

Huawei Marine’s MARS Cable Reaches Rodrigues Island

WFN Strategies to Exhibit, Talk Arctic at PTC ’19

SubCom Announces Manatua Cable Contract in Force

SubTel Forum to Exhibit and Broadcast @ PTC ‘19

China Telecom Philippines to Hong Kong Cable Link Eyed PNG Upholds Deal with Huawei to Lay Internet Cable

CABLE FAULTS & MAINTENANCE

EGS Completes Survey for Coral Sea Cable

Basslink Report Says Outage Cause Unknown

ASN to Build Cable System for INFN, Neutrino Telescope

EA-ME-WE 3 Repairs in India Underway

Hemisphere Cable Company, NEC Announce WASACE 1

Tele Greenland Says Cable to Iceland Breaks

Cabo Verde Telecom, EllaLink Sign Cable Agreement

Vietnam Internet Slow After Undersea Cable Rupture

Africa-1 Subsea Cable System Coming Closer to Reality ASN Begins Construction of EllaLink Submarine Cable

CURRENT SYSTEMS Telxius Operates Two Highest Capacity Submarine Cables

STATE OF THE INDUSTRY

Telstra Buys Quarter Share of Southern Cross Cable

OFS, Avon, CT Facility is now AS9100D Certified

Superloop Submarine Cable From Sydney to Singapore Complete

Telecom Egypt, Fiber Misr Sign Submarine Cable MoU Southern Cross Cables Limited Selects New CEO

DATA CENTERS Equinix Announces Build of New Data Center in Helsinki Liquid Telecom to Invest in Egypt Network, Data Center

TECHNOLOGY & UPGRADES Adva Trials 300G Over Transatlantic Distance Microsoft, Facebook Test 400G Across Marea AJC Completes Major Upgrade with Infinera

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SUBMARINE TELECOMS MAGAZINE

REGISTRATION

NOW OPEN!

Register at www.suboptic2019.com

ADVERTISER CORNER Kristian Nielsen Vice President

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

L

ike me, you may find it hard to believe that 2019 is already here.

With the New Year, as always, your faithful publishers here at SubTel Forum are pleased to announce the 2019 Cables of the World map and 2019 Industry Calendar are winging their way to you. In fact, you may have already received your Calendar, and for those of you still waiting, copies are still being delivered.

Firstly, I’d like to thank the fantastic sponsors for their support of the Map and Calendar. Without the support of our sponsors, we wouldn’t be able to continue to bring the broad array of SubTel Forum publications to market.

ASN eMarine Fugro Hengtong Hexatronic IT KCS NEC Nexans

OCC OFS PadTec Southern Cross Spellman STF Analytics SubOptic WFN Strategies Xtera

These sponsors, along with the other advertisers throughout the year, comprise some of the best and brightest in the industry. From technology innovators to state-of-the-art installers and market-defining project implementers,

66 SUBMARINE TELECOMS MAGAZINE

the businesses advertising in SubTel Forum are at the top of their respective corners of the industry. Advertising in SubTel Forum not only features you amongst these fine brands but will

From technology innovators to state-ofthe-art installers and market-defining project implementers, the businesses advertising in SubTel Forum are at the top of their respective corners of the industry. place you in front every decision maker and thought leader in the submarine telecoms industry.

With the beginning of each year, we start our publishing calendar anew and with that seek advertisers and new sponsors for the year. The benefits of advertising in SubTel Forum are not just simply placing your brand in front of the industry. Advertising buys you the right for your press releases and news about your organization to the front of the line in the STF Pressroom – a PR VIP treatment.

The analysts in the STF Pressroom scour the internet daily for press releases and news about the industry.

If you’re reading this magazine, you’re

likely already well familiar with the daily newsfeed, something that started as a newsletter some 17 years ago and has grown in to a full-blown news aggregation service with updates as often as hourly if the news day calls for it.

By advertising in SubTel Forum, you place your company at the head of the line when our analysts are prioritizing what stories run and when – the SubTel Forum PRiority Queue.

With that said, I implore you, while setting your budgets and marketing goals for 2019, consider advertising with SubTel Forum. Visibility, industry standing, panache, prioritized PR announcements, the benefits of being a sponsor of SubTel publications are without equal in our niche of the telecoms world.

The next 3 months leading up to SubOptic 2019 will be some of the busiest in the industry, make certain that your company gets the visibility it needs to make a big splash at the industry’s premier conference in April.

As always, you may find our latest 2019 Media Kit here: https://subtelforum.com/advertise-with-us/ And should you have any questions, or desire a customized package or report, please feel free to reach out to me directly. STF Loyally yours,

Kristian Nielsen Vice President

ADVERTISE WITH US!

FOR 2019 MEDIA INFORMATION VISIT: WWW.SUBTELFORUM.COM

THE VOICE OF THE SUBMARINE CABLE INDUSTRY