Re: "Advances in undersea connector technology improve efficiency"
By Stewart Barlow, Ocean Design Inc.
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"Wet-mateable connectors simplify network buildouts and allow upgrades and maintenance on the seafloor.
Imagine connecting eight-way fiber-optic cable segments on the murky deep-sea floor. Sound impossible? Well, it's not. Over the last three years, seafloor fiber-optic networks have been laid in several ocean environments, including the North Sea and abyssal Pacific. The connector technology is here, and it works. It enables an operational flexibility that greatly reduces the cost of installing and maintaining seafloor communication systems.
Today's technology allows, for instance, connectorized branching units, repeaters, and universal splices. Telecommunications cables can be deployed with dormant branching points. Later, remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) or autonomously operated vehicles (AUVs) can plug in extensions as they are needed. All that is possible without the usual recovery of the parent cable or a dormant pigtail cable.
These wet-mateable connectors are rugged--tough enough to support launching through cable engines to full ocean depths, including direct burial. Undersea telecommunications cables, which heretofore have been deployed as continuous strings of segments joined by costly, time-consuming shipboard splices, can now be connectorized in advance and simply plugged together sequentially when launched, greatly reducing ship time. Another advantage of undersea systems using wet-mateable connectors is that damaged cable segments, repeaters, and
branching units can be replaced at the seafloor by unplugging the devices and plugging in new ones.
What took so long?
Why haven't wet-mateable connectors been viable sooner? Certainly, the use of optical cables undersea is now quite mature, with the first transatlantic telecommunications cable (TAT-8) deployed in the late 1980s."
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