The Global Conference that Connects the World: PTC, Honolulu, Hawaii—January 15-18, 2023

One of the telecommunications industry’s largest conferences, Pacific Telecommunications Conference (PTC), is due to take place in Hawaii next week. As always, the event will be attended by a team of sector experts from Ocean Specialists Inc. (OSI) led by the longtime Director of Network Operations and now company President Perry Wright. He will be accompanied by Dave Willoughby, Managing Director of Operations and Tony Mosley, Director of Business Development.

The team looks forward to a long overdue in-person visit with clients and industry colleagues to discuss the current subsea industry trends and share insights as to how global networks evolve in a post-pandemic world.

The industry faces several significant challenges, including the deceleration of subsea investments by Hyperscale after 2024 and the continued downward pricing pressure as more network routes overlap and offer alternate connectivity to many more locations globally.

The industry will continue to face outages to the average of 1 cut every 3 days on all routes as supply chain fundamentals rebound post pandemic, meaning more transshipments throughout network choke points more anchor drags and fishing aggregation devices (FADS) deployed for subsea cables to contend with on the ocean floor. A cable repair industry in high demand and dogged by slow permitting processes will restrict maintenance operations.

Much of this will be high on the agenda at PTC. Assessing dilemmas and identifying suitable solution has been the mainstay of PTC since its inception over 30 years ago, when a group of telecommunications carriers decided to bring the industry together to manage accounting rates and satellite connections for the voice industry. It’s a brave new world and there is no shortage of challenge or uncertainty—but a professional community that prides itself on leveraging present-day technological advances to propose real-world solutions for tomorrow wouldn’t have it any other way! See you in Hawaii. Please contact tmosley@oceanspecialists.com for meetings.