NEPTUNE Canada The Contractor’s Viewpoint By Antoine Lecroart
For an industry-leading supplier like Alcatel, embarking on the NEPTUNE Canada adventure is certainly a thrill. For a somewhat change reluctant industry, such an unprecedented regional size cabled observatory represents novel ideas, quite a bit of new development, lots of sound engineering and definitely a good dose of out of the box thinking. Getting to new markets generally means developing new products and NEPTUNE Canada is no different in that regard. Although Alcatel’s standard solutions include a comprehensive set of wet plant options, they normally provide communications from one land-based location to another land-based location. This time Alcatel is developing a “dry to wet” solution that not only includes communications but also delivers large amounts of power to the undersea experiments and sensors. Alcatel’s cable, repeaters and branching units
will be qualified to work with much higher line currents than what they were initially designed for. While using standard single conductor cable, the 10 KV powering scheme will be totally new to a telecommunications company entering the field of land based power grid parallel feeding whereas standard systems rely on series power feeding through the cable. The communication subsystem will also rely on a unique combination of optical and IP networking equipment including the Alcatel 1696 Metrospan (MS) using Forward Error Correction (FEC), the Alcatel OmniSwitch (OS) 6800 and the Alcatel 7450 Ethernet Service Switch (ESS) providing scalable and reliable Ethernet aggregation from all nodes. The selected Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) ring architecture allows each node to be disconnected without affecting the rest of the network offering a good level of resilience. The combination of optical and IP technologies will optimize bandwidth and minimize delays in information exchange between the scientific teams and their instruments. Alcatel will also provide installation and provisioning of the cabled observatory infrastructure and has proposed options to further maintain the system after it is put in service. The deployment of NEPTUNE Canada requires expertise and know-how in a wide variety of fields and Alcatel indeed offers a unique combination of skills comprising market-leading optical networking expertise, highly performance IP gear and solutions provisionning, proven deep sea equipment design and installation, and ultra high voltage handling making them a natural candidate for this project. Alcatel is not alone on this project, and has on its team other valuable members: Nautronix MariPro, the world leader in cabled undersea sensor systems, for mechanical design and the integration of the undersea node and Satlantic, a world leader in precision sensors and observing system technologies, for the low voltage control and monitoring subsystem.
Increasing the understanding of the oceans to give scientists, educators, policy-makers and the general public a new way of studying and understanding issues critical to our survival – including earthquakes, climate change and energy sources – is driving the interest for new sea floor cabled observatories. In that scope, submarine cable networks provide an ideal solution to build either dedicated infrastructures such as undersea telescopes or multidisciplinary cabled-observatories.
The opening to new markets based on the “dry to wet” applications has been slow to develop as some want to see a real scale demonstrator before they will express confidence in these solutions. The NEPTUNE Canada project is clearly ahead of the pack and will be seen as the true precursor in providing the scientists with an unchallenged tool for a better knowledge of the complex deep sea environment.
Antoine Lécroart has been working in the submarine industry with Alcatel for over 15 years. After being a technical project manager for the S560 submarine line terminal equipment, he was in charge of technical bidding for the first optically amplified transoceanic systems. He was subsequently responsible for Product Marketing within Alcatel for five years in Europe and three years in the US. Now in France, he is in charge of Marketing and Sales for Emerging Markets such as Oil & Gas and Science Observatories.