Benoit
Kowalski gave the presentation at the event. The diagram below shows
the standard subsea network architecture. The fibre optic cable and
optical amplifiers are collectively called the wet segment. The rule of
thumb is to bury the cable in waters a thousand meters or less deep.
Approaching shore one has a choice. One can give bring the cable ashore
using small boats. The cable initially lies exposed on the beach up to
the beach manhole. Then the cable is buried from some point in the water
up to the manhole where it is spliced into the front haul fibre that
carries the signal to the cable landing station. From the CLS back haul
fibre goes to a carrier neutral data center that serves as a point of
presence (POP) or interconnection point. The other platinum-plated
approach uses horizontal drilling to install a bore pipe from the
manhole to a point on the sea floor offshore. This is much more
expensive, but better protects the cable.
A
couple of things to note. In the beginning was the PTT, which was the
only telecom network providing service in a country. Since the wet
segment needs high voltage power, it made sense to build a facility
called a cable landing station where the power feed equipment was
located. And naturally the submarine line termination equipment with the
lasers and DWDM gear also would be installed there. When PTT
consortiums arose, the corporate culture of centralized control led to a
model where the consortium owned the wet and dry segments. Common
ownership meant that each consortium member got a percentage of lit
capacity based on their total economic contribution to the project,
which included invested funds, landing rights, cable landing stations,
etc.
Over time this monolithic
architecture or vertical integration has unraveled. Some consortium
members wanted their own fibre pairs so a subset of the consortium might
hold shares of lit capacity and other members might own fibre pairs
that they managed themselves including the SLTEs. An early example of
this is the ASE cable where Telekom Malaysia took two fibre pairs
whereas the rest of the consortium had shares of the lit capacity on the
other fibre pairs.
The American Tech
Giant completed this unbundling of network elements. They wished to
minimize their cost per bit. This required big capacity subsea cables.
Often in excess of their needs. So the model arose where the OTTs built
very high capacity systems based on the new technology of spatial
division multiplexing to exploit all economies of scale. Then they sold
the excess capacity to third parties, typically competitive wholesale
providers and also PTTs. Capacity sales meant IRUs on either spectrum or
fibre pairs. And since the OTTs have very different network
architectures from the carriers, it was best to allow everyone to select
their own SLTEs or DWDM gear and where it should be installed.
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