FEATURE
SUBMARINE NETWORKS: AN EVOLUTIONARY CHANGE - PART 1 BY DEREK CASSIDY
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ommunications is a very powerful and strong word, and it evolves many things within people. From the earliest societies to the present day, it has developed into an umbrella word enveloping many different forms of communication from the spoken and written form to the mass interactions we have with people and machines, across the globe. The development of communications can be categorised into different revolutionary or evolutionary periods, depending on which way you look at it. These different periods in human history coincided with or influenced the evolution of human society, pushing it further along the path of development and enlightenment. Each period being more transformative that the preceding period. But also, being the launchpad for and contributing to next evolutionary stage in the development of communication. However, none were more influential or decisive than the other as each evolutionary communication change brought with it, its own dramatic influences. However, there is one evolutionary change in communication that did lead to a substantial change in how people communicated and interacted. This change in communication direction can be identified as the internet age. The age of mass communication where the many actors could interact with this new way to communicate and help the evolutionary process. Over the last thirty odd years the development of the internet has been always in a fast state of change compared to the previous communication eras long gone. The term internet, which is used to describe an international set of interconnected networks that help form a single united network sharing an agreed communication protocol, is itself a description of what we have today. Networks spanning the globe interconnecting with other
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SUBMARINE TELECOMS MAGAZINE
international, national, and local networks forming the internet we know today. However, since the emergence of Covid-19 and its rampant surge around the world, the need to lockdown society was required to try and develop some sort of defence against this pandemic. But in doing so the economy and society itself needed some sort of coping mechanism. It came in the form of broadband connectivity. The sudden move away from the office and the requirement to setup new working stations in domestic settings created a huge demand on the existing broadband infrastructure. This demand was so sudden that many network operators had to hasten plans to increase their network capacity overnight. This was only possible because of two separate factors that both worked together to deliver the backbone of this new high-capacity bandwidth; optical channel bandwidth increase and submarine cable infrastructure. It is easy to see why the optical channel increasing from 10Gb in the early 2000’s to the emergence of the 100Gb optical channel in 2010 and re-engineered in 2013 had a great effect on the capacity of optical networks. This increase in capacity along with the introduction of 400Gb optical channels, all agreed and standardised by the IEEE, would be the backbone of the network growth today. The ability to pack as much data into an optical channel and then getting as many of these optical channels onto a single fibre with the aid of dense wave division multiplexing (DWDM) and Flexgrid technology truly helped the scaling upwards the capacity on optical terrestrial and submarine cable systems. These systems were helped when using coherent technology which was a true driver behind the explosion in broadband
