FEATURE
INTEGRATING MONITORING TECHNOLOGIES TO SECURE SUBMARINE CABLES BY JAN PETTER MORTEN, MARTIN CONNELLY, STEINAR BJØRNSTAD, JAN KRISTOFFER BRENNE, AND ANDREW DESFORGES
T
he crippling effects on society and business from fiber breaks are a worry for cable owners and governments. The most common cause for such cable damages are bottom-trawl fishing and ship anchors that snag cables on the seabed. For regions with limited route diversity, this can result in major disruption like the multiple incidents that damaged the cables connecting Shetland and Faroe to the mainland in October 2022. The threat to submarine telecom systems has been exacerbated by the recent deterioration of global security, making willful sabotage to disturb marine infrastructure a scenario that must be considered. Fortunately, substantial resources are made available for repairing submarine cables in case of an incident. The coordinated coverage of dedicated repair ships around the world ensures quick response. The spending on the maintenance agreements governing these capacities show that cable damage is considered a serious condition justifying
32 SUBMARINE TELECOMS MAGAZINE
continuing investments to mitigate. A submarine cable system comprises sophisticated terminal equipment for monitoring the performance and integrity of technical components like modems and repeaters. This supports the reliable and stable telecom connections that we rely on. However, very limited attention is directed to protecting the cable along the seabed route. Other than cable burial at installation, direct monitoring for potential threats is often limited to sporadic inspection surveys to determine the state of the cable. The lack of comprehensive seabed cable monitoring is perhaps to be expected, since it is expensive and inefficient to do subsea inspections over long distances along cables. Persistent cable threat monitoring is therefore usually limited to surface monitoring using e.g., guard vessels, collection and monitoring of AIS (automatic identification system) vessel movements data, and some places radar. Until recently, cost effective and robust seabed sensor tech-