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Joint & Cable sample
sent to Alcatel
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During April and May 2004, Southern Cross and its partners completed a successful fibre fault repair on Segment D of the Southern Cross Cable Network which runs between Spencer Beach, Hawaii and Morro Bay, California. This repair was necessary due to the single fibre failure on fibre pair 1 of Segment D on February 7th, 2004.
The planning and execution of a successful fibre repair is a detailed and time intensive exercise that brings all the skills of Southern Cross, Global Marine, Alcatel, Cable & Wireless, Southern Cross landing parties and the cable repair ship The Bold Endurance into play.
Once it has been established that it is indeed a fibre fault and the location of the fault is identified, the process kicks off with alerting the cable ship and putting them on notice. A series of pre repair meetings are held and repair and traffic migration plans are developed. Restoration plans are also reviewed and updated. “Customer communication is a vital part of the planning process” said Brian Hart, Southern Cross’s Operations Manager who is responsible for the co-ordination of the repair. “We endeavour to keep our customers fully informed and do our best to work in with their timing requests when migrating traffic in preparation for the cable cut” said Mr Hart.
With the traffic migrated off the affected segment (in a configuration that still allows for a protected network) and the cable ship at the repair ground, the actual fixing of the fault commences. Once seabed conditions are confirmed, the first item on the agenda is for the ship to begin its cutting drive which simultaneously seizes and cuts the cable. The “good” end of the cable is raised and tested to confirm that this section of cable is functioning properly; it is then buoyed off for later recovery. The ship then moves down the cable to a point where it can bring onboard the faulty section of cable. This faulty section is tested to pinpoint the exact location and nature of the fault. The cable is recovered back to the fault which is cut out and jointed to replacement stock cable. The cable ship then re-lays new stock cable back to the buoyed-off end, recovers this onboard and completes the circuit by splicing the ends together. The fibre repair ran to schedule and took the allocated 8 days to complete.
Recommissioning tests to check the integrity of the repair and traffic normalisation which returns the network back to its normal state are the final stages. “We were very happy with the running of the Segment D fibre repair” said Mr Hart “everything went to schedule with minimal customer impact – just how we intended”.
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