Ocean Specialists Inc. (OSI) is pleased to announce that the company’s President, Perry Wright, will be presenting a paper—Subsea Cable Security Through Enhanced Monitoring—at the Valentia Island Subsea Cable Security and Resilience Symposium, taking place at the Valentia Cable Station from October 10–12, 2024.
Simply put, subsea cable security refers to the safeguarding and protection of subsea cables, from both malicious and accidental threats to the cable laid on or buried below the seabed. Planning, monitoring, and protection are fundamental for network system security and integrity.
Almost all of the world’s information—99.5% in fact—travels along submarine cables every day, traffic that cannot be replicated by satellites. Satellites are certainly a critical network component of global communications—and vital for areas underserved by submarine and terrestrial cables—but key commercial data, national security information, and media content are mostly transmitted around the world via the 528 submarine cables that currently reside on the ocean floor, with each cable having two or more shore-end landings.
According to the International Cable Protection Committee (ICPC), each year, there are approximately 180 cable breaks, cuts, abrasions, and unplanned events that disrupt communications on these indispensable cables. That amounts to an average of one outage every two or three days! With the necessary cable repairs taking weeks or even months in some cases, the potential ramifications of outages are far-reaching and can have significant financial and potential geo-political impacts. Consequently, most governments now deem subsea cables to be critical infrastructure.
The economic data that travels via these subsea fiber highways represents over $15 trillion in banking and trade transactions. When major outages do occur, they can halt global trade and close financial markets.
Today’s world is so interconnected that life without these cables would almost be unrecognizable. Protecting them is something that cable experts have worked long and hard to achieve. Protection through burial at installation and the use of an Automatic Identification System (AIS) has long been the standard approach, but a series of recent unforeseen incidents indicate that more is needed.
Best practices require that submarine cables and their network of wet and dry plant infrastructure have the highest available network protection given our reliance on ready data for national security, economic activity, and entertainment. The ongoing and heightened security of submarine networks involves protecting these cables from external threats and subsequent damage, but when there is disruption to service it is the vessel and cable owners who are held responsible for any repair and maintenance work.
OSI’s role in Submarine Cable Protection and Sensing is expanding to support the coming wave of security safeguards needed to keep this critical infrastructure suitably protected. For more information, please contact OSI at connect@oceanspecialists.com.