FEATURE
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IGH C H G AP N I
A Discussion of Cable Manufacturers BY STEPHEN NIELSEN
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iven that the submarine telecoms industry has a history of more than 170 years of continuous development, it can be surprising how vague many concepts are as their actual definition doesn’t span the industry. What constitutes “Deep Water?” How long does a cable need to be to be “Long Haul?” For the purposes of this High Capacity Issue of Submarine Telecoms Forum, we asked the question “What is a High Capacity cable,” and discovered that the answer wasn’t so clear. “The definition of high capacity is constantly changing,” said a representative of HMN Tech. Along with HMN Tech, Hexatronic, Prysmian and NEC responded to a Q&A regarding the current state and future of the High Capacity cable manufacturing industry. All four are notable cable manufacturers in the submarine telecoms industry. There are currently seven primary cable manufacturers supplying the submarine telecoms industry: ASN, Prysmian, Hexatronic, HMN Tech, NEC, Nexans, and SubCom.
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“Currently, one could argue that any repeatered cable containing 16 fiber pairs could be regarded as high capacity, but that’s a pretty arbitrary number, and doesn’t take into account the capacity of each fiber pair,” said NEC’s response. “Also, at the current growth rate of traffic demand, today’s notion of ‘high capacity’ will become more and more mainstream.” Similarly, Prysmian defines high-capacity as 48 fiber pairs for unrepeatered cables, and 16 for repeatered. Alternately, the response by Hexatronic argues that a truly high-capacity cable would be “a submarine cable of 96 fibers or more.” This definition, however, could only be applied to the unrepeatered cables, given that current repeater technology can only handle roughly 24 fiber pairs. This highlights a current large disparity in what could be considered high-capacity cable in unrepeatered vs. repeatered cables. HMN Tech can claim a maximum of up to 1000 fiber pairs in their unrepeatered cables while their repeatered maxes out at up to 32 fiber pairs. NEC currently has cables with 24 fiber pairs in production, and state that
