Welcome to the 46th edition of
Submarine Telecoms Forum, our Oil & Gas issue. Following another interesting Submarine Networks conference in Singapore, I had the opportunity to visit Western Australia and environs. To any outsider, Oz is by its very nature an amazing place - where surfers in the south share their waves with Great Whites, or sunbathers and casual boaters in the North dodge crocodiles laying in wait - and to this frequent beach comber and diver I found it both unnerving and exhilarating.
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But I also must admit that the feel of the area was incredibly exciting. Gone was
the doom and gloom economic malaise I left behind in Virginia. The attitudes were positive and forward looking. I thought one afternoon sitting, in a café drinking a “flat white” coffee, that this is how Houston must have felt in the 1970s. Building was booming; people were smiling; things were happening. This is Dodge City, man. Things are indeed happening in the Australian oil patch, and they are signing 25+ year production contracts for basins still under construction for customers in Japan and beyond. Things look up, up, up. And just as other managers in other energy boom times have had to decide whether to go fiber or not, so, too, local
Oz IT managers are considering now how best they will control and manage and talk with a diverse array of offshore assets. Similar decisions have been made before, and it will be interesting to watch how they downunder in turn will choose.