By Sean Buckley
With a number of new submarine cabling systems coming on line and other routes being updated, Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) and TE Subcom decided it was about time to refresh their joint maintenance partnership.
Targeting opportunities in the northern Pacific market, the ‘Pacific End-to-End Maintenance Solution’ enables the two companies to more effectively respond to maintain and repair faults in undersea cable system routes.
Although submarine cable systems are designed to last 25 years, cables are vulnerable to natural disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes and even ship anchors.
Already working together in the Pacific since 2008, the two companies have deployed additional cable ships this year to increase response times to network damage.
In addition to sales of microwave and DWDM, submarine cabling has been a growth engine in Alcatel-Lucent’s optics division. Among the submarine cable network customer highlights in Q2 were an agreement with ASC International selected Alcatel-Lucent to build its new submarine cable linking Perth, Australia and Singapore.
