AQUA COMMS
QUICK FIRE QUESTIONS FOR NIGEL BAYLIFF CEO AQUA COMMS
INSIGHT ...
How many miles of cable do you currently have under the sea ? Aqua Comms currently has two cables in operation with another due in 2022 ( AEC-3 ) from Boston to Slough . There are also two shorter routes from Dublin to Anglesea and Blackpool plus plans for a cable from Europe to India – via Egypt and down the Red Sea ( EMIC-1 ) - which will be ready in 2024 . This equates to 20,000km which includes AEC-3 and another 10,000km from EMIC-1 so 30,000 total operational or in development by D9 . Where are the cables made ? Our two live ones were made by Subcom in Portsmouth , New Hampshire in the US and we are having more made & laid by Alcatel Submarine Networks in Calais , France . They travel 70-80km at a time and then they have to be connected to amplifiers , which boost the signal . The cable is then wound backwards into a ship . In the case of our cables we laid them from either side and met in the middle which took about eight months . How do you work to ensure the cable has the shortest passage through the shallow water ? We spend a year surveying an exact route –
mapping up to 5,000km – and lay the cable along this route very accurately . We send out ships to survey the seabed and make sure there are no boulders , we avoid rock falls , shipwrecks , other cables , fishing grounds and navigate over the Mid-Atlantic Ridge . The Atlantic has about 300km of shallow water at each side which is less than 1,000 metres deep in which we have to bury the cable using a plough to avoid anything which disrupts the sea bed , like ship anchoring and bottom / trawl fishing . Why is Aqua Comms not using legacy cable systems laid in 2000 ? A lot of cables were laid around that time and are now getting old and almost incompatible with modern day product requirements . We ’ re all about selling a large pipe of bandwidth , and the current currency level is 100 gigabits , the next step up is 400 gigabit circuits and the older cables can ' t handle that technology as they have insufficient optical clarity in them . In 2015 Aqua Comms laid one of the first two cables across the Atlantic in 16 years . What is your focus when it comes to sustainability ? Most of the reduction in CO2 in the last 18 months should not be attributed to the pandemic but to telecoms which enabled us to shift to remote work , education and socialising and reduce our travel emissions ” We should take that carbon deficit and chalk it up as a positive . Of course it ’ s not a zero-cost to install cables as it is essentially a product which does use fossil fuels in manufacturing and installation , but having cables on the seabed for 25 years will reduce the need for people to fly around the world to conduct business .
188 February 2022