AI is shaking up the submarine cable ecosystem

Interview

At this 12 months’s Submarine Networks EMEA occasion, we caught up with Thomas Soerensen, Vice President, International Gross sales at Ciena, to debate the ever-changing submarine cable panorama and a number of the key applied sciences driving change in 2024

The rise of AI is a serious focus this 12 months on the Submarine Networks EMEA convention. What impression do you assume that is set to have on the submarine cable ecosystem?

AI is contributing to elevated information and capability necessities which, in flip, will contribute to the continued progress within the submarine cable market.

I consider AI will enhance community efficiency and efficiencies for all service suppliers. Listed here are some examples I feel will likely be actually vital:

• Superior community monitoring and fault detection: With AI, suppliers can analyse information from a number of sources in real-time to quickly pinpoint faults to minimise downtime.
• Predictive upkeep: AI analytics can assist predict gear failures and facilitate proactive upkeep planning earlier than points happen. This helps optimize useful resource allocation, cut back opex prices, and maximise the lifespan of vital infrastructure.
• Automated community planning and optimisation: AI algorithms can optimise the design and routing of submarine cable networks, contemplating value, site visitors patterns, and environmental impression. This can assist streamline community planning processes, improve effectivity, and expedite the deployment of recent cable programs.
• Safety/Clever menace safety: AI can analyse community site visitors patterns, detecting anomalies and find potential threats or unauthorized actions.

Is that this shift in AI primarily being pushed by hyperscalers? What do you consider their continued position within the subsea {industry}?

Hyperscalers are at the moment main the {industry} by constructing large quantities of AI infrastructure in and between their information centres, initially for consumer-centric functions. Hyperscalers are sometimes on the forefront of technological innovation, driving the adoption of rising applied sciences and the event of recent options to repeatedly advance the submarine networking {industry} now and into the long run. That is evidenced by a handful of hyperscalers representing over 70% of all used worldwide site visitors, as per analysts from TeleGeography.

Earlier this 12 months you upgraded the Sea-Me-We-4 cable to extend its capability. Inform us extra about this course of and why it’s vital?

The Europe-to-Asia route, the place SEA-ME-WE 4 is located, is experiencing a serious digitalisation push, leading to excessive capability calls for. To assist rising demand for extra bandwidth throughout this route, SEA-ME-WE 4 is leveraging Ciena’s GeoMesh Excessive submarine community answer to extend capability from 65Tb/s to 122Tb/s.

The Ciena improve helps optimise the assets of the SEA-ME-WE 4 cable, enhancing its capabilities by means of enhancements in community capability, flexibility, and sturdiness. Importantly, this may permit the cable system to take care of tempo with voracious world demand for bandwidth, shield terabits of site visitors, and guarantee optimum community availability.

We’ve seen some cable outages in current months, brought on by each environmental and man-made occasions. What must be achieved to make submarine community connectivity extra resilient?

The seabed could be a hostile atmosphere for energy and telecom submarine cables. Though unpredictable pure disasters, like undersea earthquakes and landslides, could cause widescale harm, most submarine cable faults are attributable to people, such a fishing nets or anchors snagging submarine cables within the seabed, particularly in shallower waters the place cables should not buried or armoured.

Defending undersea cables takes all the ecosystem and Ciena is dedicated to driving better community resilience and reliability. And, whereas we can not regulate (or educate) Mom Nature, we are able to regulate and educate folks concerned in marine actions such that they’re conscious of close by submarine cables and take applicable precautions.

Organisations just like the Worldwide Cable Safety Committee (ICPC) play an vital position in selling submarine cable safety and resilience by way of cross-industry collaboration and liaising with entities throughout the {industry}, governments, and academia to holistically perceive submarine cables and the environments the place they’re put in. About 98% of all submarine telecom cables are represented within the ICPC, as are energy cable homeowners, offshore renewables builders, cable ship homeowners, cable operators, cable producers, and different stakeholders. Collectively, committee member determination makers and regulators can have interaction with the broader {industry} to share technical experience, particularly round vital allowing processes.

And, as we’ve mentioned already, by means of the usage of superior software program, powered by AI, operators may leverage new community monitoring instruments to detect potential faults, analyse site visitors patterns, and determine anomalies, threats, or unauthorised actions.

What’s the subsequent huge breakthrough for optical networking know-how?  

There are numerous thrilling developments within the optical house – it’s a part of the rationale I like working at Ciena!

Ciena has an extended historical past of management in optical and our WaveLogic improvements have enabled an unimaginable 20-times enhance in information site visitors over fibre and a greater than 90% discount in Watts/Gbps in our clients’ networks.

So, while you ask me what the subsequent breakthrough is in optical, I need to say it’s WaveLogic 6!

WaveLogic 6 would be the first coherent optic answer to assist as much as 1.6Tb/s single-carrier wavelengths for metro ROADM deployments, as much as 1Tb/s for transoceanic hyperlinks, and energy-efficient 800G pluggables throughout 1,000km distances.

WaveLogic 6 additionally helps handle operator’s sustainability objectives as a result of WL6 leverages state-of-the-art, lowest energy applied sciences to assist community suppliers make sooner progress in direction of these targets.

With the rising position of AI in varied industries, how is Ciena integrating AI applied sciences into its digital infrastructure options, and what advantages does the corporate foresee for its clients?

Our software program portfolio (Navigator Community Management suite and Blue Planet Clever Automation) makes use of subtle analytics which acquire detailed real-time efficiency metrics from community units and switch that information into actionable insights.

Now we’re going even additional with AI, Machine Studying (ML), and the size of cloud assets, to ship exact, predictive evaluation primarily based on huge portions of information. This helps our clients higher optimise the best way they construct and function their networks. For instance, they’re capable of proactively do community upkeep earlier than points happen or fine-tune capability allocations earlier than efficiency degrades.

As confirmed by working with {industry} specialists, AI community builds are anticipated to be advanced, and information centres are going to be unfold all over the world attributable to varied constraints like energy, regulation, latency, and information privateness. To handle this actuality, Ciena has options particularly designed to allow world information centre networks and their administration features.

The following step is to automate operations – so known as AI-driven closed-loop operations. Total, with AI, our clients can function their networks extra cost-effectively and enhance buyer satisfaction, giving them a aggressive edge.