Building a submarine network for offshore applications

Building a submarine network is a challenging endeavor since it encompasses many different areas of expertise as well as a broad range of hardware and network management tools. Of course, great store must be paid to the overall cost base to ensure that the system ownership cost is minimized over its life cycle. The key parameters are generally bandwidth flexibility, network reliability and costs. As far as the offshore communication market is concerned, the prime candidate for system architecture will likely be that of an unrepeatered system. This paper is a three-pronged introduction to unrepeatered systems as it pertains to the offshore market. The main applications are described as well as some similarities to terrestrial systems. Then the current state-of-art systems are reviewed along with their hardware breakdown structure with the main insights into the technological, environmental and cost challenges involved in putting it all together. Finally, some key components such as the cable, the cable installation and maintenance and the transmission equipment are further analyzed and discussed in order to give the reader an understanding of the submarine infrastructure performances and cost tradeoffs.