Scientific Submarine Cable Projects By Kurt Ruderman
Last month, the University of Victoria in British Columbia awarded Alcatel Submarine Networks a $33-million dollar contract to supply and build the Canadian portion of an undersea system for scientific research that will mark a new phase in oceanography. The entire project, called NEPTUNE (North-east Pacific Time-series Undersea Network Experiments) will incorporate more than 3,000 km of submarine telecom cable when completed, making it the world’s largest undersea observatory. Neptune will be operated by a consortium of U.S. and Canadian scientific institutions led by the University of Victoria in Canada and the University of Washington in the United States. The recent award to Alcatel follows years of planning by the organizations involved, and it will be the first in a new series of large-scale regional subsea-cabled observatories in North America and Europe. The NEPTUNE project will deploy equipment on the ocean floor for realtime oceanic monitoring and scientific experiments on the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate off the Pacific coast of North America. In Europe, a European Union backed program called ESONET, which comprises 10 national projects, could use more than 5,000 km of fiberoptic submarine telecom cable. The North American and European projects also will need large amounts of custom-made hybrid cable (fiber and copper) to connect subsea equipment.
Kurt Ruderman is based in Paris. He is the Editor and European Correspondent for Fiberoptics Market Intelligence, which is published by KMI Research, a division of PennWell. Mr. Ruderman’s reporting also takes him to Latin America, North Africa and the Middle East.
The projects will allow scientists with different expertise to simultaneously use subsea-cabled observatories to study the ocean. The coordinated research will help countries monitor and respond to pollution, global warming, earthquakes, and other dangers to global security. In North America, NEPTUNE project scientists will be able to share information with colleagues in other institutions using high-speed research and education terrestrial networks such as CANARIE and Internet2.
In Europe, scientists will communicate with each other using a pan-European network called GÉANT. NEPTUNE and the regional subsea-cabled observatories will use the latest submarine telecom technology but also will require the development of new equipment, power systems, and subsea installation methods. “Designing NEPTUNE has been a real challenge,” explained Peter Phibbs, associate director of engineering and operations, NEPTUNE, Canada. “Alcatel must take terminal equipment and layer-two switching, which is normally put in an air-conditioned room on land, and instead install it on the ocean floor. The equipment must be dependable since repairs cannot be done often.” In the first phase of NEPTUNE, Alcatel will deploy a subsea-cabled observatory for University of Victoria, comprising an 800-km, two-fiber ring on part of the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate off the coast of Canada. Four branching units on the submarine cable will connect to base stations housing nodes located at various points of scientific interest along the route. Initially, only two base stations will be equipped with nodes. One node will be in 250 meters of water and the second in 2,200 meters. “Over the last decade there has been too much optimism about the cost and ease of installation of these systems. It is really the University of Victoria with its NEPTUNE Canada program that is leading the way,” said Professor Monty Priede, Oceanlab director University of Aberdeen, Scotland. “With the award of the contract to Alcatel we are going to find out for the first time what industry can really deliver.” Alcatel will design, manufacture, install, and commission the submarine cable system, using densewavelength-division-multiplexing technology, with an initial design capacity of 160 Gbps. Additionally, Alcatel will deploy its 1696 Metrospan WDM system