Where does the UJ Consortium go from here? By Stewart Ash
For more than 15 years the owners of submarine cables have enjoyed the benefits to marine maintenance operations of a single jointing technology platform provided by the virtual monopoly of the UJ Consortium. Over these years significant technological advances have been made in all other areas of submarine cable technology but the Universal Joint (UJ) and Universal Coupler (UC) have changed very little. Today the market is significantly different to the one in which UJ technology was conceived. The members of the UJ Consortium are different with different aspirations and the requirements of systems owners are much more focused on the costs of marine maintenance than they ever were in the past. So, does the UJ still have a role to play in the industry and can the UJ Consortium continue to meet the needs of its customers? History The concept of a universal jointing technology was born out of the large cost to the owners of the first transatlantic fibre optic system TAT 8, who had to support three separate jointing technologies in order to maintain a system containing three cable designs (Alcatel, AT&T & STC). When TAT 9 was being planned, the major system owners, AT&T, BT and France Telecom agreed to jointly invest in developing a single technology to joint all three cable designs. This was the birth of UJ and in 1990 a ten year agreement was signed between Alcatel, AT&T SSI and BT Marine to develop and support the UJ (cable to cable) and the UC (cable to repeater) technologies. In 1992, the concept of universal jointing was successfully launched into the Pacific region and KDDI became a member of the UJ/UC Consortium. By 1995, a large number of small diameter cables had been introduced to the market
to address the unrepeatered or repeaterless market. To respond to the needs of this market, a new consortium was formed to provide a smaller, quicker to build joint; the Universal Quick Joint (UQJ). The members of this new consortium were again Alcatel, AT&T SSI and BT Marine. However, the basis on which this new agreement operated was different in a number of ways to the UJ/UC agreement, which for a few years, while they operated in parallel, caused customers some confusion. Shortly after the inception of the UQJ Consortium, AT&T sold SSI to Tyco, BT sold BT Marine to Cable & Wireless and in 1999 Cable & Wireless sold Cable & Wireless Marine, including their UJ interests, to Global Crossing.
Universal Joint Kit Structure
Cable A
Key:
Cable B
Cable End Specific Kit Common Component Kit Protection Kit
For the rest of this presentation I will be concentrating on piece part kits and therefore for those of you who are unfamiliar with the kit structure adopted by the UJ Consortium I have taken the liberty of using a slide presented by the UJ Consortium at PIOCMA in 2003 to illustrate this.
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