Session Details

Date:Monday, 18 January 2021

Time:05:30–07:00

Location:Auditorium, Online Conference Platform

WEB_DESC:Sponsored by:

Today’s 420 + Submarine Fiber Optic cables represent millions of kilometers of infrastructure submerged on the ocean floor. This subsea infrastructure potentially represents the opening of a new window into earth’s movements and subsea oceanographic research. For the past 10 years the Joint Task Force for Subsea Cables led by Dr. Bruce Howe at the University of Hawaii, has been working hard to introduce new ocean observing capabilities into submarine cable suppliers, with some limited successes which are today beginning to come to fruition.

Some of the JTF’s work and some bold steps taken by cable suppliers and developers has led to one of the latest commercial telecommunications cables - EllaLink having ocean observing capabilities along with the normal telecommunications capacity. Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) has been an element available in EllaLink which is innovative in the subsea space and with other cable operators bringing State of Polarization (SOP) measuring techniques forward. EllaLink and its cooperative partners, GEANT, EMACOM, ANACOM and others will be one of the first of its kind to develop ocean observing capabilities along with telecommunications infrastructure. These kinds of investments in submarine cables will set a new operating standard for future cable project.

But as these innovative capabilities evolve in Submarine cables the concerns of regulators and nation-states must be mitigated and addressed to unlock these capabilities to support the greater good. The legal community and United Nations under UNCLOS auspices must allow for these new predictive marine data sets from Submarine cables to support long term cable maintenance, analytics for earthquakes and tsunami early warning. This new rich set of data will have Marine Sovereignty concerns no doubt but working through the concerns will assist research scientists better observe the planet.

This session will have key members of the EllaLink team and its partners along with DAS experts and Legal experts for a lively and informative hour to discuss the merits and challenges that lay ahead for new Submarine Cable operators.