home

Insight Prysmian Magazine

A convergence of Digital Transformation and Energy Transition

banner_1600x680

A convergence of Digital Transformation and Energy Transition

Did you know, that today nearly 100% of all Internet Traffic is passing through submarine telecom cables installed globally across all the oceans, seas, rivers and lakes? 

Submarine telecom cables started with telegraphy about 150 years ago and until recent past used mainly for telephone calls, faxes and emails. During the last 15 years data traffic exponentially increased due to huge grow demand coming along with internet traffic, social media, streaming and video calls. The future demand is expected to get another exponential boost driven by Artificial Intelligence applications and solutions. The data requirements will rise, data computing will increase, and this will raise the demand of traffic that needs to be transmitted through submarine cables. The demand for submarine telecom cable is obviously high in the telecom industry but due to its various usage and smart applications its demand is constantly growing as well in the energy eco system and power utility networks.

“We at Prysmian are at the forefront of this convergence of digital transformation and energy transition.”

Ashutosh Bhargava

Ashutosh Bhargava

Business Unit Head Submarine Telecom at Prysmian

Repeaterless optical fiber cables do not need power feeding equipment, which makes them attractive in terms of capital expenditure and sustainability. Prysmian with it strategic partners is constantly endeavored to increase the link lengths of repeaterless systems and has installed one of the largest and longest repeaterless systems on global basis. Recently subsea telecom business unit successfully executed high capacity repeaterless link between Italy and Montenegro which is more than 450 km. 

As a great example of convergence of digital and energy eco systems Prysmian is in the process of delivering another high-capacity link of more than 500 km along a submarine HVDC interconnector cable for one of its esteemed power utility customers in Europe.

“The company is aiming to make its submarine telecom cables increasingly smart in terms of their ability to monitor various factors in their environment so they can be effective sensors for other types of infrastructure such as power cables."

Heiner Ottersberg

Heiner Ottersberg

Head of R&D Submarine Telecom at Prysmian

With the growing demand optical fibers capacity on strategic routes and increasing cost of installation high fiber count cables are in huge demand and Prysmian is a world leader in this field of technology. Prysmian has a specific design for these optical fiber cables and can offer the highest fiber counts in the market, with up to 288 fibers in a single central tube in the MINISUB 288 cable family and multi-tube ultra-high fiber-count designs with up to 1728 fibers manufactured at its site in Nordenham, Germany. Prysmian has already provided such an ultra-high fiber count submarine cable (with 1728 fibers) including qualified joints for a high-capacity strategic connection in San Francisco Bay (USA).

“Due to its high quality, yet simple and cost-effective design, Prysmian high fiber count submarine cables are first choice for some of the world’s major OTTs, Hyperscalers, telecom operators and connectivity providers.”, said Ashutosh Bhargava.

Prysmian is working continually to increase the fiber count, or number of fibers in one cable, to accommodate the exponential boom in data traffic. 

“We are now looking for ways to make the fibers themselves smaller and introducing fibers with multiple cores into our future designs”, said Heiner Ottersberg.

Prysmian’s Subsea Telecom unit is also catering to some strategic and selected repeater cable systems. It has executed and been involved in several strategic international and regional repeater systems like HAWK (Mediterranean), JaKa2LaDeMa (Indonesia), MARS (Indian Ocean) etc. It is presently executing a high capacity, high fiber count state of the art repeater cable system between Jakarta and Singapore and is involved in various projects globally to support its Strategic customers on a worldwide basis.

‘’Our Mission is to be actively involved and be at the forefront of the convergence of Digital and Energy eco-systems. With the support of other business units of Prysmian and by closely working with strategic customers and partners we are confident to be the leader of this revolution.’’ said Ashutosh Bhargava.