Tony Mosley, OSI’s Director of Business Development, participated in a keynote panel discussion—Protecting the population? Submarine cables for environmental sensing—at Submarine Networks World 2022 on September 8 in Singapore.
The panel session was led by moderator Dr. Bruce Howe of the University of Hawaii, Chairman of the SMART Cables Joint Task Force, Joel Ogren CEO of Assured Communications, Sushin Suresan, Optical Systems Lead, CISCO, Ik Icard, CEO Far North Digital, Guiseppe Valentino, VP at Sparkle and Tony Mosley, Director of Business Development at OSI.
The session focused on the utilizing submarine cables for environmental sensing and early warning capabilities, an effort to protect the public from natural disasters such as earthquakes and tsunamis.
The SMART subsea cable project has been in development with the JTF for over 10 years. SMART Scientific, Monitoring and Reliable Telecommunications is an effort to design sensors for cable repeaters. The information gathered from the sensors (pressure, temperature and acceleration) will be available to the science community, providing another data reference point for scientists, oceanographers, marine biologists, seismologists and climatologists, and to Tsunami Early Warning centers, providing another method for rapidly identifying threats to coastal areas.
OSI is a leading contributor in the JTF repeater development. The sensors will add another dimension to the tools available to protect the population with early warning information. Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) and State of Polarization (SOP) are the two further efforts underway, together adding more data sources for the science community.
There are segments of the industry that believe these data points will be used for state-sponsored monitoring capabilities leading to undesired activities, but the more transparency given to the data outputs, along with standardization policies, limits the ability to conduct such operations.
The potential benefits from adding sensor packages to fiber optic cables far outweigh any downside in protecting the public, according to leading scientists in the field such as Dr. Bruce Howe.