2010 Tutorials

This Master Class Tutorial will focus on the mitigation of risk throughout the design life of submarine cable systems that result from proper route engineering. The objectives of this session are to:

* Highlight the critical importance of submarine cable infrastructure not only to the internet user and in traditional voice communications but also put into context how critical submarine cable networks are to the world’s financial institutions; to world commerce, and in the execution of almost all financial transactions
* Provide examples of the consequences of cable outages be it a single cable failure or simultaneous multiple failures that can result from the dragging of ship’s anchors and fishing activities to catastrophic seismic or meteorological events such as the Hengchung earthquake and Typhoon Morokot
* Examine the planning tools and applications available to the route planner and cable engineer including the desk top study and how these tools contribute to optimizing pre survey route selection, risk identification and risk mitigation
* Discuss physical and political routing constraints including seabed terrain, tectonic activity, conflicts with other seabed users, the design goals and design constraints of the system, the physical constraints of the hardware and installation technologies, and political boundaries
* Provide a review of route survey processes and technologies including the role and ability of the route survey to identify and mitigate risks to the installed cables. Examples will also provided of the roll on impact of reducing survey scopes of work in the interests of cost saving or compression of survey schedules and poor or inaccurate survey data that may result in the need for re survey; the need to manufacture at risk, and the potential of invalidating system business models resulting from delays in RFS dates
* Examine cable protection and installation strategies including costs and benefits, and review the various maintenance options and scenarios available to system owners
* Look at the costs and benefits of proper route engineering from the owners perspective in terms of the “real” Total Cost of Ownership of the system, and the cost and negative reputational impact of system repair rates that are above average versus the positive reputational impact of a robust and reliable system with below average repairs

This session will also provide a link to the following Master Class Tutorial 4 Understanding Permitting

Governments and the general public continue to believe in various myths about undersea cables - to the extent they are aware of undersea cables at all. These myths range from mistaken beliefs about the primacy of satellites in international communications, the environmental harms of cable installation, and an oversupply of international capacity to outlandish but surprisingly common misunderstandings that sharks represent the principal threat to undersea cables or that cables have a diameter of half a meter or more.

This basic ignorance is shocking given the paramount importance of undersea cables to the global economy, national security, and citizens’ daily lives, and it greatly complicates the installation, operation, and maintenance of undersea cable systems around the globe. Governments adopt - or fail to adopt - policies and regulations, thereby driving up costs, lengthening project and repair timelines, and increasing the possibility of conflict with other seabed activities.

To provide but one egregious example from the United States, the White House Task Force on Oceans Policy recently conducted dozens of roundtables in developing a new national plan for coastal and marine planning, yet declined to conduct a roundtable with the telecommunications industry, as there were “too many other issues to consider.” Instead, the Task Force has framed oceans policy largely as a conflict between the energy and the environment.

In recent years, a number of commentators have proposed educating government policymakers and regulators about the legal regime protecting undersea cable-related freedoms. While such efforts are important, they are insufficient and in some cases counterproductive, as international law arguments are often disparaged as an affront to national sovereignty. More than anything, governments need a political reason for acting on undersea cable-related matters.

This Master Class seeks to provide undersea cable operators, suppliers, and service providers with the tools for combating ignorance about undersea cables and thereby improving government policies and regulations. First, it will consider how undersea cables are most commonly misunderstood and misrepresented and how those myths harm the undersea cable industry. Second, it will consider who is doing the misunderstanding. Third, it will propose practical strategies for educating policymakers, regulators, and the general public using a variety of arguments and tools.

With the glut of undersea capacity gone, the demand for new capacity is fueling new investment in cable construction and system upgrades.

The robust pace of demand growth and roll-out of new services present new challenges in the design of undersea cable networks. At the same time operators continue to struggle against rapidly declining capacity prices. Specific areas of focus in the tutorial include:

* Global Internet backbone capacity traffic growth trends and undersea cable utilization
* Trends in undersea cable system configuration and design
* A review of wholesale capacity pricing trends around the world

The tutorial is suited for attendees seeking a deeper understanding of bandwidth demand trends that drive new system construction and upgrades as well as the capacity price trends that impact cable operators' business models.

Aside from financing contracts (which this session will not cover) there are a number of important commercial contracts which anybody involved in the submarine cable business should understand. This session will analyse them as follows:

* Construction & Maintenance Agreement – or “C&MA”. In the case of a consortium cable this is the key contract entered into between the various member-operators. It governs their relationship and how decisions will be made about the cable as well as how they divide costs and capacity.
* Cable System Construction Agreement – this is the contract with the system supplier under which they supply and install the cable. SubOptic’s Legal Working Group has developed a new model contract for this and there is a separate session to go through it so this session will only touch on this briefly.
* “IRUs” and capacity leases – contracts by which capacity on a cable system is sold or leased to customers. There is still a great deal of misunderstanding in the industry about the meaning of an “IRU” and this session will attempt to give some clarity on the subject!
* Landing Party Agreements – by which a licensed operator in a country where the cable lands agrees to provide a landing station and, usually, backhaul. They may also act as a sales agent of some kind.
* Maintenance Arrangements – the contracts by which the cable is to be maintained – either by a specific arrangement or else by means of joining a regional maintenance programme.

Project permitting has evolved into critical-path issues for all parties involved in the development of submarine fiber optic telecommunications systems. These critical-path permitting issues compound the risk factors for all parties involved in the planning, implementation, and management of a project.

The magnitude of risk is a function of the extent to which certain events are foreseeable and manageable. As an example, a permitting process that is both well-defined (e.g., foreseeable within certain timeframes) and manageable (e.g., an action concludes with an expected result) has less risk than a unpredictable and poorly defined permitting process.

The Master Class Tutorial will focus on a discussion of the following:

* Types of permits required and the existing processes used for project planning and implementation;
* Problems encountered from the associated permitting efforts; and
* How evaluating permitting issues and risks early in the process can assist with project planning and reduce risks.

The Tutorial will include perspectives from the various parties involved in fiber optic projects and will consist of a panel of experts representing system suppliers, system owners, project management consultants, legal consultants, and permitting consultants.

The risks associated with a fiber optic cable project can be attributed to a variety of issues (eg: financial, geographic, political, and permitting). In order to evaluate how permitting can impact a project, the panelists will provide their perspective and insights concerning how they manage and respond to permitting issues during each phase of a fiber optic cable project.

These issues include:

* Overall objectives of the business plan;
* Project timeline;
* Markets to be served;
* The geographic footprint, route, and landing site selection;
* Technical complexity of the installation of networks; and
* The legal or regulatory requirements for installing and operating a system.

The panelists will present their ideas, opinions, and recommendations on which tools or methods need to be implemented to decrease the risk factors associated with the permitting process.

Attendee can expect to gain the following benefits from attending this MasterClass Tutorial:

* A thorough grounding in the different phases of submarine fiber optic cable projects and how the permitting process impacts each phase;
* Compare the practical benefits of developing a better permitting management methodology/tool to the more conventional step-wise approaches;
* Learn from previous project examples and the management methods applied during several case studies that will be examined during panelist discussions;
* Provide a better understanding of how to reduce potential risk elements that have hindered a number of recent cable construction programs, thereby reducing cost and accelerating time to realizing revenue.

Note: Presentation file is a ZIP file containing multiple Adobe Acrobt PDF files which make up the presentation.