SUBSEA A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE FOR SUBOPTIC 2025 A Review from the Student & Young Professionals Track
BY CAROLINE CROWLEY, IAGO BOJCZUK, AIDÉ CABRERA, AMINA IBRAHIM, LANDRY MOYOU, AND FEDERICA TORTORELLA
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his year at SubOptic 2025 in Lisbon, Portugal, the conference halls gained fresh faces and new energy. Thanks to the inaugural Student & Young Professionals Track, sponsored by the SubOptic Association and welcomed warmly into the main program, attendees could rub shoulders with rising members of the submarine telecoms industry at the world’s longest-running and most comprehensive industry event. The Track brought together more than twenty students and early‑career professionals from over 15 countries, spanning disciplines from telecom engineering and maritime operations to environmental science and internet governance. Over the course of the conference, participants immersed themselves in expert‑led masterclasses, roundtables, research presentations, and field visits to local internet infrastructure sites. Highlights included tours of host company Alcatel Submarine Network’s cable‑laying vessel Ile de Sein and the EllaLink Network Operations Center. Staff from Start Campus also welcomed the youth track to tour their 1.2GW AI-ready Sines Data Center, a pioneer in sustainable digital infrastructure solutions with seawater-based cooling and high energy efficiency. Organized and facilitated by Student & Young Professional Coordinator Iago Bojczuk, the new track offered participants a meaningful way to engage with and contribute to the broader conference dialogue. “Attending SubOptic 2025 has been a
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transformative experience that deepened both my academic curiosity and my professional ambition,” said Landry Moyou, a graduate student pursuing a master’s degree in Enterprise Digital Architecture at Télécom ParisTech. “I came to the conference with a strong technical foundation, but what I found at SubOptic was much more—a global ecosystem of infrastructure builders, innovators, and strategists engaged in rich, forward-thinking discussions about the future of connectivity.” Despite backgrounds in a wide range of disciplines, members of the Track are coming together for this month’s article with a common focus on one area repeated throughout the SubOptic proceedings: sustainability. Members presented their own work
on the topic: Hesham Youssef, a senior transmission engineer at Telecom Egypt, with “Metrics for Cable Landing Station Sustainability,” and Tochukwu Egesi, a PhD candidate at the University of Cape Town, with “The Potential Use of On-Site Renewable Power for Cable Landing Station.” These contributions draw on research developed by the Sustainable Subsea Networks team over the past three years and were made possible through academic-industry collaboration. They reflect the value of ongoing exchanges between companies and researchers, the importance of data sharing, and a growing commitment to deeper cooperation between industry professionals, academia, and broader society. The headliner session, starting off the