2004 Tutorials and Short Courses

The Tutorial aims at providing inputs on all aspects of submarine cable projects, from their genesis to their operation. It will detail, step by step, actions and tasks required from a cable promoter to turn its the initial concept into a robust and cost effective project and leading edge submarine cable system.
The most frequent project structures will be reviewed, from the "Consortium Cable" to the "Private Cable" emphasizing the aspects specific to each structure.
Key issues such as competition, technology, risks, cable route, landing sites, system configuration, contract negotiation, construction & maintenance agreements and financing aspects will also be discussed together with more practical considerations such as work permits and authorizations-to-land-a-cable, station construction, commissioning and acceptance, maintenance, NOC and system upgrades.

This tutorial will outline the recent progress which has enabled high capacity transmission submarine optical networks relying on the well known dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) technique. The presentation will first go through the enabling technologies for wide bandwidth optical amplifier schemes based on erbium doped fiber or distributed Raman amplification. Then, the different types of fiber and associated features - with first of all the chromatic dispersion - will be discussed and illustrated through long haul transmission experiments. In a third part, this tutorial will report on the efficiency of various signal processing techniques such as modulation formats and forward error correction codes. Finally, some technologies specific to the unrepeatered systems will be presented.

This tutorial covers all aspects of the marine route planning, route engineering and cable engineering for undersea fiber optic cable systems. It is intended for an audience with some familiarity with undersea cable projects and with marine route planning and survey. The course includes: 1) an overview of how route engineering fits into the overall project cycle; 2) the importance and aspects of cable route planning and Desktop Studies; 3) general guidelines and rules for landing site selection, route selection and cable armoring; 4) specific engineering aspects (alter courses, slack, cable crossings, cable touchdown etc.) from the perspective of the installer and maintainer 5) documentation and charting and GIS tools used in route engineering. Details of marine survey are not covered and are left to other tutorials. Although this is a broad overview of many relevant topics, discussion of any special topic of interest with SCIG is encouraged.

The SCIG is an informal forum of several major industry suppliers which places emphasis on installation and maintenance. Its mission is to develop cost-effective approaches and solutions to improve cable reliability and to communicate these to relevant international parties.

The commissioning and acceptance phase is a fundamental step in the supplying of submarine cable systems.
The tutorial will show how this phase is typically performed for repeatered systems, exploiting recent international submarine tenders and contracts to describe the acceptance period concept and the main goals that have to be achieved within the contractual plan of work for the successful commissioning of a system.
Some basic concepts related to power budget, main measurement techniques and relevant system parameters are also introduced and discussed.

This tutorial is intended to be an introduction to optical transport network architectures. It is not aimed at providing a set of architectural solutions for typical situations an operator may face today. It rather puts the emphasis on the generic issues an operator has to address when defining or redefining the architecture of its transport network(s). These issues are common to all types of optical transport networks: terrestrial long distance and metropolitan networks as well as submarine networks. The tutorial describes a general methodology to tackle these issues. Nevertheless, the description is illustrated with a series of examples borrowed from the long distance terrestrial, metropolitan and submarine domains. A brief presentation of the networks that are beginning to take shape will be given through illustrations