FEATURE
REPEATERLESS AND REPEATERED SOLUTIONS FOR REGIONAL SUBMARINE CABLE SYSTEMS
BY HEINER OTTERSBERG AND ASHUTOSH BHARGAVA
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ewly built long-haul and ultra-long-haul submarine cable systems offer huge surplus capacity which needs to be filled and fed through the regional networks. Together with the existing networks, they provide a worldwide grid of data highways connecting huge data centers and global hot spots. An increasing demand for regional feeder networks is been created for both repeaterless and repeatered technology. These regional feeder networks have a much smaller footprint. They may connect parts of the same country or multi countries of a geographical region. Systems connecting cities along the coastline of Chile (e.g. PRAT 3500 km), Norway (e.g. KYSTELE 1000 km approx.) or Islands of Indonesia, Philippines, Greece etc. or Countries of a region like Caribbean (e.g. ARCOS joining 15 countries of Caribbean), Baltic or Mediterranean countries like France, Italy and Spain are good examples of such regional systems. Compared to long haul systems, the regional systems are easier to finance, there is often just one customer and their time to market is shorter (less than two years from concept to implementation). The regional networks need to be high quality, state-of-the-art but cost-effective with priorities to the security, performance of the network and sustainability. Design flexibility, low CAPEX and OPEX are the major advantages of such systems.
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