This tutorial will survey the need for high bandwidth, low latency and reliable digital communication in offshore fields. It will provide insight into critical technical criteria and considerations when designing, constructing and maintaining an undersea cable system solutions from the end user and oil & gas perspective. System ownership models especially in emerging markets and options for ongoing operation and maintenance will be discussed. The tutorial will conclude with a forecast of the anticipated undersea communication requirements for the oilfields of the future. Mr. Otto manages the Field Digital Infrastructure BP’s Exploration and Production segment worldwide. He currently has responsibility for undersea systems in operation or being developed in the North Sea, Gulf of Mexico, Azerbaijan and Angola offshore fields. Mr. Otto holds an Electrical Engineering degree from the University of Iowa. He has worked supporting telecommunications for oil & gas for over 15 years.

The tutorial will be aimed at non-experts and will offer a primer on how a submarine cable build can be financially engineered. It is intended that by the end of the tutorial someone without a finance background should be comfortable with the basics of project finance and have the confidence to begin to deal with the more advanced finance issues that may arise at any stage of a project. The tutorial will introduce the basic financial statements (P&L or Income Statement, Balance Sheet and Cashflow) and their purpose, together with the key differences between them.

This tutorial will briefly trace the history of undersea cable communications, from the initial telegraph cable of the mid-19th century to the present multi-Tera-bit trans-oceanic fiber optic cables. It will also discuss the evolution of the surveillance initiatives, which began over a half-century ago and continue apace. We will describe how this combination of disciplines has led to the more recent initiatives in the area of research and surveillance/security applications.

If you look out to the current telecommunications scene, what you will see is faster and faster bit streams running in an everyday evolving network of optical fibre cables and jumping in the air from one spot to another through satellites and microwave links, able to reach the most distant limits of our world in a few seconds. In the tutorial it will be firstly discussed general aspects as how, in our society, communication is our daily currency and your chances for development, as an individual as well as a group (professional, country,..) leans to a very great extent on access to information. So it is a general aim, from the social and business point of view, to reach as many people as possible.

The international research and education community has mounted significant efforts to develop a new generation of networking capabilities that have at the core infrastructure owned/controlled, provisioned and managed by the R&E community. These networks are all-optical with multiple point-to-point wavelengths, currently at the 10Ge level. Services provisioned across these backbones are multi-layer, multi-service in nature, including Layer 1, 2 and 3 services. A number of efforts are focused on the “control plane” issues of how you manage and monitor provision of “hybrid” services across multiple service layers, across multiple network domains, often on an international basis.