Some random musings regarding Subsea Cable Fault Location

Below is an article that I posted 6 years ago. I don't believe much progress has been made in the period since I published the comments.

I have included a link below to the original posting and the comments received previously.

All, I would like to provoke a discussion on Fault Location so below are a few random musing that I would appreciate comment on.

With a number of new cables being installed and a few regular failures being reported (Sea-Me-We 3 (Singapore – Australia), AAG (near Vietnam), I would be interested in your opinions regarding the following topics.

? Does the industry in general and individual companies in particular, have appropriate equipment and expertise to identify and accurately locate any failures?

? Is there sufficient investment in equipment and resource to facilitate fault location?

• ? When a cable repair is in progress and it is reported that “when the initial fault was repaired a second fault was noted”. Do you feel that the initial repair was the actual fault or simply a repair to a “cut-in” that was made to enable “the real fault” to be located? Multiple failures in a short time period are actually very rare.
• Is the necessary time and resource being allocated to analyse all the data available to try to get the location “right first time”
• Is there enough sharing of information to enable improvements to be made in the ability to accurately locate failures?
• Is there adequate “root cause analysis” being conducted to establish a way of avoiding subsequent failures on the same cable and in a similar location?
• Could the industry benefit from an independent third party examining the data and analysing where improvements could be implemented?

I have spent many years trying to improve fault location capability whilst working in the BT Subsea Team and would guess others may be similarly occupied.

Your thoughts please?

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