VITAL RESILIENCE FOR SUBSEA INFRASTRUCTURE
SWITCHING TO LEO WHEN CABLES NEED REPAIRING
Subsea telecommunications cables carry 99% of all intercontinental data and website traffic around the world. Their strategic importance in our daily lives is equal to that of pipelines and highways. Being underwater and out-of-sight, subsea disruption is more difficult to foretell and costly to restore. For public and emergency service providers, local businesses and remote communities, a subsea cable outage can be critical.
THE CHALLENGE
Subsea cables age. Ocean floors move. Boretides pull. Incidents occur with passing ships. Accidents, natural events or hostile acts have left communities stranded, businesses cut-off and lives compromised. Costs of restoration and reparation can run into many millions of US$. Operators face a range of challenges:
• Interoperability issues with inherited infrastructure
• Pressure from insurance companies demanding back-up resilience from fibre companies
• High costs from lost revenues, repairs and reputational damage
CRITICAL NEEDS
Greater preparedness is needed among local network service providers for their customers, who are wholly reliant on subsea cable infrastructure. Permanent resiliency measures are needed where outages are likely to occur.
• Satellite terminals onsite, secured and ready for service activation
• Trusted local partners to identify immediate needs in the event of a break
• Strategic forward planning and budget allocation for resilience
This is a wake-up call to us all, that we need to be sure that we have our emergency plans dusted off and that we exercise them and see what redundancy we can build into our system to ensure there is a rapid failover available to us should something like this occur again in the future.
Mayor of NOME, Alaska
OUR SOLUTION
Eutelsat delivered installations and activations of satellite network communication solutions, collaborating with two trusted local partners to restore network access to customers following several cable breaks in Alaska, providing:
• Hardware: OW70 terminals deployed and activated in multiple landing stations
• Timely response: fast connectivity supply and service management
• Planning ahead: Flexible CIR service plans in scope for permanent backup
THE IMPACT
• Safeguarding critical public services for remote communities
• Risk mitigation costs a fraction of outage restoration
• Greater resilience for businesses and emergency providers