International Submarine Cable Systems

Laying a new cable system can often be a multi-year effort. From business opportunity recognition, to requirements definition, to landing zones, to contract, to cable construction, to implementation, to testing.....you get the idea. It can take a while.

A few companies specialize in undersea cable deployments. Alcatel-Lucent is one. Alcatel-Lucent provides a wide array of hardware, software, facilities, and services to carriers. Alcatel even maintains its own fleet of ships to maintain cable systems for customers. Surprising to think that a telecom company like Alcatel has a fleet of ships.

Companies such as Alcatel can be contracted with to deploy new undersea cable systems. Once the fiber is ready, Alcatel uses its ships to deploy the cable in essentially 6 steps:

Float the cable from the deployment ship to the shore to be connected to the landing station.
Disconnect the cable from the floating buoys and allow it to fall to the ocean floor, typically the continental shelf.
Use a Remote Operated Vehicle (ROV) - essentially an unmanned submarine - to bury the fiber optic cable under the ocean floor. This keeps the sharks, fishing boats, rock slides, and currents from affecting the cable. It also makes it harder for spy agencies - like the CIA, NSA, KGB and other agencies with TLAs - to find the cables and tap into them.
Continue across the ocean, adding repeaters where necessary. The ROV continues to bury the cable.
On the other side of the ocean, repeat step #1 - float the cable from the deployment ship to the shore to be connected to the landing station.
You now have an undersea fiber optic cable deployed. Alcatel has a very nice flash demo which shows this process.


Unfortunately, events often occur that cut undersea fiber optic cables. This can lead to massive outages, particularly in countries with limited and/or restricted Internet access. Carriers have gotten much better in the past few years dealing with undersea cable faults. Service restoration prioritization - for example, private MPLS services over general Internet - is done automatically now by optical mesh clouds based on standards such as GMPLS. Verizon often touts its optical mesh technology for undersea cable systems.

However, when a cable cut occurs, it has to be fixed. Fixing a cable cut is done with the same ships that laid the cable in the first place.