Back Seat Driver By Rob Munier
How is My Driving? In the last 5 years the role of technology in undersea systems has gone from market driver…..to the back seat. More and faster has been replaced by thinner and cheaper. Business cases are about niches and sovereignty, not the latest and greatest. Technology changes are incremental, not leaps and bounds. Technology is no longer pushing projects. Rather, new projects are pulling smaller R&D budgets, emphasizing refinements. The spectacular achievements of the late ‘90s have provided a mature technology for the current marketplace and positioned telecom solutions as a platform for related applications. Mature or Obsolete? Successful suppliers have highly developed core system components including cable, optical amplifiers, joints, branching units, power feed and transmission equipment, with hundreds of thousands of kilometers deployed and millions of hours of reliable operation. Prior to deployment, large investments were made qualifying these components for mechanical, electrical and optical performance in order to assure a 25 year design life. Qualification also included handling during loading, laying, burial and repair operations and validation of performance at depth. As a part of this process, the interfaces between components have been qualified and standardized, providing considerable flexibility in system design and enabling considerable interchangeability of components between the major suppliers. These development and qualification activities, as well as the dozens of successfully deployed, currently operating systems are the collective result of the huge investments in technology. While mature, the technologies developed from these investments are delivering reliable service to system owners and inspire the confidence of their customers.
Non-traditional and special purpose applications of undersea telecom technologies are related or even emerging market niches. These include: · Scientific and industrial observatories · Undersea ranges · Surveillance systems · Harbor defense · Oil and gas communications and control systems Observatories can have single or multiple nodes capable transmitting data from sensors for a simple time series of a single key parameter to supporting multiple and varied inputs such AUVs and active and passive sensing. Ranges generally involve active and passive acoustic transducers for the purposes of signature determination, silencing and training. The trend in range configuration is away from individually cabled and towards in line transducers. Surveillance systems are used to monitor vessel movements and are generally targeted to locations of strategic importance. Harbor defense systems are really a type surveillance system with the expanded requirement to detect specific threats such as certain targeted materials, small high speed vessels or divers, in addition to traditional vessel tracking. Oil and gas interests have growing requirements for reliable rig to shore bandwidth including the remote control of certain operations plus data generated from new sensor systems deployed for field monitoring. The recent devastating hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico have created a heightened awareness of the need for reliable connectivity. In addition, the high value of operations has focused efforts on disaster recovery, as every additional minute of operation enabled at either end of a hurricane event can save thousands or even millions of production dollars.
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