ICPC Study On Subsea Cable Outages: Less In The West & More In East Asia
The International Cable Protection Committee has conducted a statistical study using an 18 year time series that includes 3,000 repairs. A link to the article is attached to this post. A fault is any damage to a cable that affects performance or might in the future (like a shunt fault). 1. Fault rates per kilometer of cable have dived over the last two decades. Total annual repairs range between 150 and 200, yet total subsea cable mileage has risen from 900,000 kilometers in 2008 to 1.4 million today. However, this underestimates the decline as fibre pair mileage is probably 5x greater today than in 2008 as fiber pairs per cable have risen from 4 pairs in 2008 to 16 pairs today. 2. Faults in European waters and the Atlantic have dramatically declined due to better burial of subsea cables, distributing cable maps to commercial ships, more careful cable routing, and less fishing in some waters. For example, Northwest Europe, which includes Ireland, UK, France, Iceland, Belgium, Netherla...