Panel 1 – Accelerating Cable Repairs: Reducing Delays Through Smarter Processes 

So, thank you all, and good afternoon, and welcome to this afternoon’s session. We’re going to talk about accelerating submarine cable repairs and reducing delays, and examining some of the factors that those might be caused by. Hopefully, also hearing about some good practices.

So, today’s panel brings together government, industry, and operator perspectives to explore best practices, regulatory approaches, and practical solutions to improve repair response and recovery times.

So, I’d like to invite our panelists up. So, I’d like to invite everyone to the stage first to join me, and then I will do some introductions. So, if everyone can come up to the stage.

Thank you. and take a seat. Okay.

So by way of introduction, coming from the left -hand side, we have Mr. Rui Faria, who’s the Executive Director from Angola Cables. Next, we have Mr.

Kevin Adams, who is the Director of Digital Infrastructure at the Department of Science and Innovation and Technology in the UK government. Then we have Vincent Lemaire, who is the Vice President of Special Projects for Alcatel Submarine Networks. and Mr.

Zhigu Zhao, who’s the leading expert on submarine cables in the Ministry of Interior and Information Technology for the People’s Republic of China. And he’s also the co -facilitator for Working Group One. And last but not least, we have Ms.

Kelly Donohue, who’s the Global Head of Network Infrastructure Policy at Meta. So just to let everyone know to begin with that Mr. Zhao will be responding in Chinese, so if you can have your headsets ready, that would be appreciated.

Okay. So in terms of the structure of the panel, we’ll hear first from each panelist on an individual question, and there will be one question each, followed by a common question to draw out the experience on challenges and priorities.

And we will have some opportunities to open the floor to the audience for questions as well. So to begin with, I’ll come to Mr. Zhao first.

In your view, how can governments actively reduce the time required to grant cable repair permits?

Very good question. I think we all pay attention to this issue, including governments. But of course, with regard to this issue, from what we understand, many countries have their own circumstances and have adopted some measures to improve permitting.

But in general, me personally… I think there are two aspects to this question. First, it’s about mechanism.

How to streamline permitting mechanism? Secondly, how to accelerate response time? So in terms of mechanism streamlining, what I understand is how can we have a one -stop shop or a single wing?

And I think this morning we also talked about this single window to deal with permitting. And we know Singapore, IMDA, we think they have this already, this one stop or a single window to deal with all kinds of maritime telecommunication aspects of the question. So that…

When companies apply for permits, they don’t have to deal with different bodies, but only one single window in Singapore. Secondly, Ireland also specified their agency of maritime management as the single window to deal with permits in terms of installation and repair. So this is about the first aspect, streamlining.

And second, about response time. So for China, for major incidents of cables, we also have a rapid approval system. So in emergencies, operators can apply for this fast -track approval.

And we also know that Malaysia, with regard to specific cables repaired, they also have some kind of exemption in terms of permitting. So, I think this can really reduce response time in terms of administration time before repair ships can commence or can leave their ports. So, many countries have many good best practices.

So, working group one, we have been working on these topics and we have completed with many recommendations. For example, three aspects, some three aspects of recommendations. For example, how to build a transparent regime.

For example, what kind of frameworks, what kind of guidelines. They have to be very clear and transparent. Secondly, how can we provide under – process or procedures, for example, national law, international law, under this framework, how can we reduce barriers or streamline approval process, for example, customs exemption?

So, second aspect in terms of streamlining process. And third aspect, so, as I said, a single point of contact, so governments can designate a single point of contact, this can really streamline the whole process. So, all these recommendations are actually responding to industry’s requests or expectations.

So, three aspects of recommendation. Thank you. they are very scientific.

They are also doable, feasible. And the key now is how to operationalize and how to really execute these recommendations so that we can really improve and streamline the whole process. Thank you.

Thank you, and there’s some very good practical steps there. And talking about accelerating response time and having a one -stop shop, I think is very relevant to the discussions and the recommendations too, which brings us nicely to Kevin Adams. So from the UK perspective, which has looked at some of these practices, what might other governments learn from the UK in terms of a model for repair permits, for example, where specific exemptions mean that there’s not a barrier for cable repair?

Repairs commencing in the first… first place.

Thanks. Good afternoon. Thank you for the opportunity to be with you today.

The key lesson from the UK is that it is possible to have a system that allows repairs to be done very, very quickly. And the key is to have as much as possible streamlined in advance and laid down what happened in what circumstances. I think Kent put up a really interesting slide before the coffee break which showed some of the repair times.

And in the UK, breaks are common. They’re becoming slightly less so, but we have in the past had amongst the sort of highest breaks anywhere in the world for reasons that are well known. We have a very busy marine environment, the nature of our coastal shelf, and so on.

So we have, although we’re very resilient, we have developed a system that has become very good at repairing breaks. extremely quickly and this is really important because we have we have a number we have a large number of international cables but we also have a number of sort of island communities around the UK that can be quite dependent on individual cable systems so it is really important to make sure they get repaired quickly when they when they do break so the key well I think the up the most important feature of the UK system is the exemption which is indoor not just in the regulations in the Marine Coastal Act which provides an exemption for emergency repairs so what this means is when there is a break or some things like less than a break that requires emergency repairs then cable operators can just get to work on that immediately and they need to notify the relevant authorities within within 24 hours but the key thing is they can just get straight on with it which again as the slides we saw before the break, I think that around 8 days or so is the average from a break to a repair vessel being at the location beginning work and depending on the circumstances repairs taking around 5 to 10 days so I flag up the legislation, I think it’s not just the legislation, so there’s a couple of other features of our system we have vessels nearby, particularly in Portland and in Brest in France so the response times can be very short because we have vessels in the locality and that’s important to us we work very closely with the operators so we have those relationships and we also have protocols and plans and processes for when things go wrong in an emergency and breaks need to be reported to the relevant authorities most of the time that just happens automatically and cables get fixed without it impacting on the UK’s connectivity but we do have those plans in place if it was a more serious incident.

Thanks Kevin. So coming to Kelly next so from an owner’s perspective for when submarine cable infrastructure is damaged can you explain in practical terms for the audience here what some of the challenges might be for a cable owner in the event of a repair being subject to delay, hopefully it doesn’t happen but when it does are there subsequent impacts for cable owners that might not be immediately obvious?

Sure, thanks John great question and thanks for the opportunity to to have me here today. I think that there are three impacts that I wanted to just highlight. Of course, there’s always surprises and there could be more downstream, but three that I think are a common trend are impacts on resilience.

You know, it really depends on the nature of the cut that needs repair. If it is in an area where their cables are crowded and serves as a single point of failure, then the impact can really be pretty material. Conversely, if there’s resilience, if there’s a vast, resilient, redundant, robust network of cables, the cuts happen, there can be very little impact because that capacity can be quickly rerouted.

And just two kind of interesting case studies highlighting the difference and the difference in impact. This is one in the Red Sea. because there were cables that were crowded together that got cut.

You could really feel, you could see the impacts from Europe to Asia capacity being congested as well as other parts of the world. Conversely, when the cuts were in the Baltic Sea, because there were many other cables that could pick up the capacity, the impact was fairly negligible from a capacity standpoint. So I think always mindful of where that capacity will be rerouted.

So I think going backwards a little bit and giving a plug for, you know, speed of installation of these cables is of critical importance because it actually then does have an impact on the repair situation.

So getting those fast permits for builds is also really critical. The other two that I, I would shine a light on are, you know, A delay in one repair can have a ripple effect downstream on other repairs. If a ship is waiting in the wings to do a repair but there’s a bottleneck or some kind of delay, we lose our slot, so to speak, and that ship has other things to do.

They’ll go and move on to the next project, which you think might not be impactful. Oh, it’s just a few days, a few weeks. Actually, there can be a lot of constraints around when a repair can happen.

There are weather windows. There are seasonal windows, fishing considerations. There’s just a lot of other things that make timing really quite a delicate balance.

So the faster we can get the repair permits, the better off and the more we can mitigate those downstream consequences. And then I think the third I would just touch on quickly is the commercial. The commercial impact.

You know, when we’re doing a repair, we’re doing it in a way that’s not going to be a problem. When a repair is necessary and there’s a delay, we need to look to our commercial partners and figure out the commercial ramifications. If there’s a bond requirement, for example, we look to our partners and say we have to figure out who’s responsible for paying.

And it’s not just about the money, it’s about the logistics and the extra time and resources it takes to address those additional issues.

Thanks, Kelly. So it’s interesting that you link not just about repair and the speed of repair, but also the importance of deployment and the intrinsic link between the two. So I’ll come to Rui next to talk about the multiple cable outage in West Africa from March 2020.

In your view, how has the industry responded to prevent a recurrence of a repair backlog in a similar way as has happened?

Thank you for the question thank you for having me thank you very much for being part of this great audience and being part of the international advisory body because it’s a basic a learning cycle okay so we have been in this industry for a long time but we have not been together all the time to discuss matters are really critical and the multi -cable break does not happen often but when it does you need to have all the consortium members for each cable working together because it requires what we just mentioned this morning it requires collaboration joint efforts and we need to basically speed up the process of repairing trying to secure the vessels trying to bring the vessels on site and making the repair as smoothly as possible because you need to decide which cable are we going to repair first because it’s not about just repairing all of the time because the industry does not have the capability of making multiple repairs at the same time on the same location.

In West Africa, it did happen something that did never occur in the past. It was a natural hazard that was not studied deeply in the past because nobody knew what was the cause of the breaks and basically we had to bring also into this discussion some scientific engineers and scientific people to help us to understand what was the natural cause that basically happened.

It brought us to that stage. What was good that it was a collaborative work, okay, that resulted in a very smooth, despite taking a few days to repair, but it was a smooth process. But the governments were involved as well, okay?

Cable operators and cable owners like ourselves, we had to do something that we are always prepared as part of our contingency plan. We need always to re -engineer the route of the traffic, okay? If that route is blocked, you need to look to the other cables.

That’s why resilient is a must. You cannot get resilient just by getting the cables. You need to use those cables.

And the other thing that’s important, we see a lot of cables being landed on the same beaches, but not on the same landing stations, okay? And those landing stations are not connected most of the time. So, what we as a cable operator promoted in both sides of the Atlantic, either in Angola, either in Brazil, is that we want our CLS connected to all the CLS in that same area, because that brings us the resilience that is mandatory.

Okay? So, if I cannot bring my traffic to this cable, I’m gonna reroute it to the other traffic. There might be some loss, latency could be affected, but in the end I’m working towards to find a solution immediately to make my customers happy, for my customers not to affect my revenue in the end of the day.

That’s the point. But, just to complement, it’s important that cable breaks is not just caused by, I would say, situations that has been raised very well by ICPC. but cable breaks most of the time are caused by natural hazards, and these we need to bring people that do understand this.

We, as an operator, we have been part of a project that took five years studying the Congo -Kenya turbidity. Congo -Kenya is the second biggest river in the world. It has a big turbidity flow that goes more than 120 kilometers deep in the Atlantic Ocean, and we need to understand why our cables were breaking almost every year or almost every two years.

So it’s important to understand this from the scientific point of view because then you can prepare yourself to mitigate the risk. So we’re talking about some level of predictability. Are cables being breaking two years?

One year? One year or five years? What should I do if that happens?

So what can I do to bring vessels and improve? the permitting and improve the authorizations for vessels to come. In all West Africa coasts from north to south, we only have two vessels that are always stationed in the same countries, South Africa and Cape Verde Island.

So we know the vessels, we know the crews, we know what they do. Well, why don’t we give a permit for the full year for them just to come here and repair wherever they want? But we are talking of more than 20 countries, unfortunately.

So each country has its own regulatory frame. But we think that there are some rooms to improve, and the recommendations from the International Advisory Board is a key point because we need to lecture most of the time regulators, the ministries of those countries to open their mind to see if there is benefits for the repair of the vessel.

But it’s not just the repair. Just a little fun. Now I’m going to finish.

It’s also for the installation, okay? and is also for the other industries that are coming nearby, like the oil and gas, for example. We need to be aware of this.

So it’s really important to understand that all this is part of the ecosystem and we need to address the ecosystem and not just the repairs.

Thank you, Rui. That’s such a good insight because we talk a lot about regulation and permitting and ships and spares, but actually the collaboration with other sectors, with the scientific community, to understand geohazards and the other things that damage cables is so important.

So I appreciate that. So I’ll come to Vincent next. So from your perspective, many countries face regulatory impediments to submarine cable maintenance.

From an industry and operational perspective, what changes in regulation, in your view, should be made to expedite repairs?

Thank you, John. So I will go a little bit further on regulation. Nevertheless, I do believe regulation should push cable owners to have the cable being part of a maintenance agreement.

It’s not the case for all the cables, and regularly we receive as a maintenance marine supplier that we are too slow to repair for cables which are not part of a maintenance agreement. So if you impose them to be part of a maintenance agreement, they will be repaired quicker. Second point, and I’m sorry for being rude there, but impose the cable owner to pay the marine maintenance fees.

There are some cable owners who don’t pay the marine maintenance fees. It doesn’t help to propose proper solution. Third, when cables are cut in territorial waters or EZs.

So if you have a cable, you have to pay the marine maintenance fees. So if you have a cable, you have to pay the marine maintenance fees. So if you have a cable, you have to pay the marine maintenance fees.

proposal of the working group one and identify a single point of contact but the single point of contact who knows what what he has to do and with having the authority on the custom on support and all the different activities that will have to be done prior to repair the cable we have example with UK or with Germany where we recently repair cables and we got a notification only 12 hours after the cable has been cut 12 hours at the time we need to mobilize so when you have a 12 hour notification your cable is repaired in one week or something like that fourth point and maybe something uneasy to to understand for people not being part of the marine mountain the repair operation of a cable is a very technical operation.

The expertise of the crew is needed to be able to repair the cable, and it will stay excellent and improve only if they practice on a regular basis. For that, we need vessels working and doing repairs regularly, not staying in port. If we have too much maintenance vessels, each one is going to do a single repair a year, and it is economically not enough, but also technically not enough to maintain high expertise in cable repair.

And I would like to add one point for the case where a lot of cables are cut in the same area. So we have that from time to time. In that case, the regulation should push the actors to work, the different maintenance agreements to work together on one side, and maybe we should define an authority who would be able to arbitrate the priorities between the different cables.

Today the rule is first in, first serve, but we could imagine to have slightly different rules where we have an arbitration done on priorities based on importance of cable.

Thank you. I think it’s a really interesting point that actually having repair vessels out and skilled people using those skills is important to retain that memory and not have losses. There’s a lot of loss of talent, so there’s a lot of discussion about more ships and more capacity, but actually that has to be balanced with making sure that that memory is kept within the…

system. So we have another question for each of the panellists, but I’m going to come to the audience first. And if anyone has a question, we have time for one or two after this first round of questions.

So there’s some roaming microphones somewhere. I can see there’s one question here in the middle, if we can bring a microphone. And if you can keep it relatively brief, that would be appreciated to keep to time.

Okay, good working. Hi. Hi, Ben Roberts from Kenya.

I’m a consultant in the industry. It’s a question actually for Meta, I think. I mean, you mentioned a submarine cut in the Red Sea last year, and then there was another one.

In southern Africa near Durban, a bit after that while that one. previous one wasn’t repaired and when that happened you know there’s a few networks you’re one of them who you know connecting to places with edge networks and supply a lot of content within a particular geography and one of the largest telecoms companies in the region in our in East Africa was it didn’t understand it when suddenly the the caching traffic they were getting the edge traffic they were getting from all of those content networks also you know that they didn’t have enough capacity and they were not getting any traffic from from these other networks so they had a double whammy right they had you know what they normally expected and relied upon coming from the content networks was gone and and also their subsea capacity was gone but in restoring like trying to get restoration capacity the telecoms companies are under a lot of pressure to get up and get their content back and get their up and running so I think my question really is how How can the restoration of telecoms networks traffic and also the content networks traffic, how can that be better coordinated as well, if that makes sense?

Thanks for the question. So I think if I understand where you’re going, it’s just how can we as multiple parts of industry coordinate and speak better in the event of an outage. And I think that venues like this and forums like this are a great place to just start the conversations and identify those opportunities where we can figure out, well, where are the spots where traffic has really been impacted or the content delivery has been impacted that maybe we don’t even see directly, but it’s further downstream.

I don’t think I’m going to solve Red Sea today, but I’m going to try to figure out where we can start the conversations and identify those opportunities. I know that having conversations about how to fix challenges like this is important and shouldn’t be. you know, it shouldn’t be limited to venues like this.

We should continue those conversations and work together to find the solutions. Thanks. Thanks for the question.

So I think if I understand where you’re going is just how can we as multiple parts of industry coordinate and speak better in the event of an outage. And I think that venues like this and forums like this are a great place to just start the conversations and identify those opportunities where we can figure out, well, where are the, you know, where are the spots where traffic has really been impacted or the content delivery has been impacted that maybe we don’t even see directly, but it’s further downstream.

I don’t think I’m going to solve Red Sea today, but I know that having conversations about how to fix challenges like this is important and shouldn’t be, you know, it shouldn’t be limited to venues like this.

We should continue those conversations. And work together to find those solutions.

Thanks Kelly. I think we’ve got time for one more if there’s any others now. There’s one in the middle.

Hello, my name is Nadia Ribeiro. I’m a legal advisor or lawyer for telecoms. My question, it could be addressed to Meta or Angola Cables.

And I’m curious, do you think that from the commercial side, has it been easy for the industry to solve in commercially reasonable terms the rerouting of traffic when we have cable cuts like we saw the cable cut in March 2020?

Yes, we have 24 with all three cables in the western coast going down and this being solved in a way that has helped all the players or stakeholders. Do you think that all operators are ready and have in place the guardrails to effectively reroute traffic in an efficient manner?

Maybe we’ll come to Rui first.

Okay, thank you for the question. Well, in our case, we try to have the best plan in place to minimize the impact to the customer. The customer is our first priority, okay?

Every time there is a cable break or cable tie, it’s an issue for us because it increases our costs, okay? Definitely. We have to pay for the repair.

Even if you are part of a consortium, the members of the consortium, they still have… Basically, to pay for some part of the repairing. it’s something that is not planning on in our budget of course we have in our budget always a reserve amount just for repairs but we don’t want that to happen but so we need to balance those scenarios okay going fast to repair the cable and make the the service up and running as fast as we can when this situation does not happen we need to reroute the traffic we need to use our alternatives infrastructure but of course with the cost and sometimes you have to buy capacity temporary capacity on other submarine cable so it’s always the question of should we do that or not we have to do because we have the SLS in the contract we have obligation with the customers but at the same time we have to increase our costs operational costs because this was not planning and therefore we need to minimize the operation costs by reducing the time of the break of the cable but sometimes situations are not the way we are planning it’s always out of our hands and we have to deal with the situation as it does exist.

ok, thank you so I think we’ll come back to my questions and hopefully we’ll have time for some more questions at the end as well so I’ll come back to Mr. Zhao next, so if everybody would like to prepare their headsets so in your opinion how can international organizations support governments in addressing the challenges which are faced by the submarine cable repair sector

Thank you for this question indeed this is a very timely and very representative challenge in terms of international organizations I think how they support governments in addressing the challenges in addressing the challenges market entities and industries, how they can address challenges in repairing submarine cables.

Of course, international organizations play an important role. In my opinion, different types of international organizations must take advantage of their own functionality and expertise and coordinate amongst them so as to leverage their synergy to contribute to addressing these issues.

Let’s look at three types of international organizations. Firstly, under the UN system, they could enhance their attention to the issues related to submarine cable repair. Our meeting today is a great reflection of that type of effort.

So China, for example, Chinese government, Chinese industry, we have attached great importance to the issue of submarine cable repair. We have also attached great importance to meetings like these. and we have participated and engaged actively.

So we also want to share our understanding and love of each other. So far, for example, institutions like IAB, advisory boards, they have had some very concrete output and outcome for our considerations, just as the outcomes listed this morning, including the working group recommendations from the three working groups, with excellent results.

Of course, they should also translate that into real work. In the future, how do we connect different systems? We believe that all their works must be incorporated under the current mechanisms of the ITU, just as we mentioned before, and this morning, some of the members have mentioned, I’m going wrong now.

how do we implement the recommendations from our working groups? Under the ITU mechanism, can we have some structure? So under the ITUD structure or framework, so that we could, amongst all the member states, we could raise awareness of all the member states in this regard, with regards to submarine cable.

I would like to also recommend ITU, together with other international financing entities and institutions, to provide support to underdeveloped island countries and developing markets. We shall also think about investments and financing mechanisms so that to address the uneven distribution, of resources in repairment. We believe that the least or less developed countries as well as island countries, they may need this help even more.

So repairment, the repair resources distribution could help them become more autonomous in terms of repairing their submarine cables. Of course, ITU has done a great deal of work and we believe that more work can be done and we are working towards a very positive direction. Secondly, let me talk about the inter -regional and inter -governmental organizations.

How do we harmonize governance structures? For example, African Union and the island states could be incorporated into regional cooperation frameworks so that multiple countries and multilateral reviews could be done together amongst these countries because we know that sometimes these cables are shared by many countries.

So the approval and coordination can be shared amongst them. How do we allow the repair boats and cable ships to sail through more smoothly and expedite the repair? And they should also promote cooperation framework amongst different governments.

We understand, for example, ASEAN, in terms of the cooperation in submarine cables, they have started some explorations and achieved a preliminary report on the results. So we think this could be further promoted. Thirdly, my last observation is that in terms of the industry associations and international level organizations, for example, we support ICPC in its work.

And regional telecom associations as well as submarine industry associations could work together also with ship owners so as to achieve more coordinated efforts in terms of repair and maintenance, so as to break down the silos and address the pain points currently existing in the system.

They could also contribute to policy input. And we shall also have a permanent and more periodical mechanism to facilitate public -private dialogue so that industry could… convey their new directions, new technologies, as well as new demands to the public sector so as to optimize regulatory framework, enhancing efficiency in the system.

We believe that in our industry, at the international level, there is great work to be done and there is great potential to be unleashed. So this is my observation. Thank you.

Thank you, and particularly for sharing some of the practical applications of the things which have been listed within Working Group 1 recommendations. So I’ll come to Kevin again next. So last year, there was a parliamentary inquiry in the UK which held public hearings to examine current challenges affecting submarine cables.

and I understand there’s been a government response to those. Are you able to share any key findings from those discussions and any measures which are being considered to be adopted that could address challenges with cable repair?

Yes, thanks. Indeed, there was a parliamentary hearing and I remember it well because I had the honour of appearing before it myself. It was the first time I’d done that, so I remember it very well.

Yes, and they did a very good job. It’s one of our very well -respected committee, a joint committee, which means it brings together both of our chambers to look at serious issues. And I’d say the context is the Committee for the National Security Strategy.

So it was looking at this through a national security focus, which meant that there was quite a lot of focus on what we consider sort of low likelihood but high impact risk. risks. So they were coming at it from a particular angle based around a sort of worst case scenario.

So it’s out there and it’s published and it’s a good read, but just bear in mind it has that particular context. It’s slightly different from a lot of the context we’re talking about here. But yeah, the committee found a number of things.

Just again, it found that the UK agreed that we have overall a good level of resilience and good connectivity. I was thinking about this again, Ken showed the sort of cable and just how vulnerable an individual cable is. And of course, that’s completely true.

But a country’s connectivity can be resilient overall. And we think we have that through the sort of multiplicity of cables, the repair capabilities we’ve been talking about. Our plans.

but even though we think we have a pretty good system the committee found that and recommended that the government do better in a number of areas and fortunately we were already working on most of those areas so we were able to by and large welcome the report and continue working on those recommendations and again we have published online a response so people can read that if they want to there’s just a few areas I’ll just sort of rattle through in particular where they focused so firstly it recommended a review of the relevant legislation in the UK and the main act we have the Submarine Telegraph Act dates from 1885 so it’s quite difficult to claim that the Submarine Telegraph Act the law probably doesn’t need a little bit of updating in light of the changing threats and technologies so we are doing that they recommended that the government work with industry even more than we are already to enhance security of cable infrastructure which we’re doing they focus quite a lot on again through this worst case scenario lens developing and crucially exercising emergency response plans so that in a very serious instance of the sort for example that Ruru is describing earlier you’re not making it up for the first time, people know who to contact, they know and have those relationships already so we’re doing more of our work in that regard.

Contingency plans I think is one of the questions we’re getting to, they recommended that we take our understanding to the next level and work with other sectors that are involved in that. would be impacted potentially by some of the more serious cable breaks, so understanding what your sort of sectoral impact and what are those contingency plans for rerouting. Finally, and perhaps very pertinently to your question, the committee also flagged up the importance of repair capability and recommended, well, made several recommendations, but really flagged the importance of that.

And as I mentioned when I spoke earlier, in the UK there is UK -based, UK -flagged repair capability, which is one of the reasons why our repair, our sort of business -as -usual repairs are so prompt, but it’s also an important capability in an emergency.

so the government completely agrees that it is important to have that capability for the foreseeable future and and we’re currently working now with industry on sort of options to make sure that continues to be in place for the future

Thanks Kevin and that’s very very relevant particularly to vincent’s points of some of the complexities around the repair ecosystem and government investment government support and that sort of thing which brings me nicely to kelly’s question which with with all the dialogue around government investment or funding from your perspectives uh or your perspective is funding one of the right solutions or are there other things which governments can do to also improve repair response times around the world and if you can highlight some some region examples that’d be very helpful.

sure um you know over the years uh i’ve heard a lot of countries uh discussing the potential potential of funding their own repair ships and having repair capacity. I think that I would just encourage countries to be very thoughtful when doing so because from our perspective, I think the market is working pretty well. Industry, as Kent flagged earlier, has maintenance zone agreements where resources are pooled and kind of the globe is sliced and diced so that regions have dedicated resources for repairs when needed.

Now there is a recognition that cuts in the Atlantic have gone down while APAC, they’ve gone up. So there might need to be a recalibration of allocating those resources, but we are actively working on that. I think the danger in having each country have their own ship is it could potentially distort the market.

and you don’t want these ships sitting idle. They are highly technical ships. They have highly technical crews.

These crews need to stay busy to keep their skills, so you want them traveling and repairing with frequency just to keep the skills sharp. So while I think that governments can invest in, you know, forensically after a full determination has been made on the need for it and any gaps, I think there are other means that governments could be looking at filling those gaps, such as using their naval capacity or emergency requisition authority for high conflict and truly emergency situations.

And then I think pivoting, you know, before anything about financing is done, we can just really shore up current systems. We don’t really know where the inefficiencies or gaps are until the situation is resolved. And so I think these systems for repair are really addressed.

So just I’d encourage every country to go back with the homework assignment of reading, you know, great bedside reading the ICPC best practices and going through it, you know, and saying, okay, how are our customs treating cable repair ships?

How are we treating crews with the visa entry requirements? How are we handling permits? Are they preauthorized or do we have to get a fresh permit for every repair?

Is there a better way to do that? Once we’ve done that, then I think we can take a look at, you know, how the current system is. Is it optimized?

Is it efficient? Or are there still gaps? But I think that’s like kind of table setting before we go into the more macro question of, you know, is financial

Thanks. That’s a really interesting point that funding can be part of the solution, but it’s not necessarily the whole thing. It needs to be treated.

Very carefully. so we’re running a little bit behind time so I’m going to come to Rui next so significant new cable construction seems to have outpaced in region maintenance provisions in some areas and maintenance resources how should the industry address capacity gaps in such regions to improve resilience and response times.

yes indeed the new cables came for the last two years up and running they are going to use the same resource they are there in the regions so nothing has been done to improve the resources time to sell to the repairing areas is still high it’s not just about permitting regulatory it’s just the time when you call a vessel to go to a certain area to repair is still very high the type of vessels that we have is still old there is a lot of time to repair there is not much new vessels and if you look at for example for the picture that has been shown by Tom on the ICPC that belongs to telegeography just the Atlantic itself as a single maintenance agreement well to a private and consortium but they they have to handle a huge region and this region the number of cables has doubled in the last 10 or 20 years okay so we need to have more vessels we need to invest more vessels but there is a problem that as mentioned here before it’s related with the high cost and how we going to recover that along the way but at same time we need to look also for new depots there’s no way for us to deal with the cable repairs with the existing cable depot We need to find intermediary cable labels.

It could be regional, very located. Mr. Zona expressed very well when it comes to using regions and using the entities that handle the regions.

And I was thinking this morning when I heard the South African lady talking in the meeting this morning about the regions, I was thinking about SADC, okay? So SADC should have a whole framework, a whole permitting procedures for all the countries, because it would simplify very much. But we also need to look at it in terms of new depots and new vessels.

But it requires a certain level of investment, okay? So I’m not seeing cable operators or cable owners investing in vessels, okay, that are there for… for a long, long time without doing no activity at all.

but we need to think as a community, as regions, okay, or as a continent, that maybe it’s time for us to consider a joint investment on new vessels and not just laying these for the private companies. And I’m thinking, for example, Brazil. Brazil is bigger than Europe, right?

How many airports do you have in Brazil or cable vessels in Brazil? None. How many submarine cables do you have there?

More than 15. 15. One five.

So it’s critical, okay? It’s really critical. They rely on the vessel that is based in Bermuda to calm down.

It’s good that nothing big and nothing strong has happened in terms of cable breaks in Brazil because most of the cables are landing in Fortaleza, which is a nice place to lay down the cables because you don’t have a big problem there on that area.

But we never know. Climate change. Climate change.

is a risk and we have to consider so it’s an example so we need to look at and we need to see and we need to take decisions quickly as regions as governments, private entities all together to change the model that we have which is a model that lasts for how many years 15 years.

Super and so fortunately we have a vessel operator here from Vincent can then give us his perspective on exactly this challenge with the average age of submarine cable maintenance ships being 20 years do you have a view as to Rui’s points on what incentives or policy measures could help modernize the fleet

So thank you John, I will give an answer from a private marine maintenance entity so the first point to renew the fleet is to ensure the marine maintenance is reasonably profitable with limited financial risk.

As you said, a new maintenance vessel is quite expensive. Has a very rough order of magnitude, $100 million. It’s a lot of money.

So the one who puts the money expects a return at some point. So for that, first, we need all the cable to be in marine maintenance agreement so that they are done. And we need cable owners and telecom operators not to rely only on cost reduction, which is the main driver for maintenance.

Your price are too high, you need to reduce your price. Okay, we can reduce our price, but if we reduce our price, we are not going to renew the fleet. In several areas of the world, the prices do not permit to replace vessels and even push the vessel marine maintenance owners to remove vessels.

This has been the case of Subcom a few years ago. Their vessels were not profitable, they removed all of them. So, the second point is that the visibility on business is not clear.

The marine maintenance agreement has three years. Compared to the profitability or the rentability of a vessel, three years is very short. So we should increase the duration and go on a foot push for increasing the duration.

The third point. Is that we should avoid to threaten marine maintenance vessels with new taxis. this will reduce again the profitability if these nuke taxes are existing this is not good for investment, it is increasing risk third point is that a vessel staying in the port is losing money so if there are too much vessels in the area and if there is no repair to be done, the vessel is going to lose money, so you are not going to invest in vessels if there are too much in the area then the vessel can’t do repair the fifth point is that we also need to authorize marine maintenance vessels to do external work so work which is not only marine maintenance but which is what we call outside works which are works related to submarine cable but which are not directly repairing cable it can be doing survey it can be doing it can be doing it can be doing PLIB activities, it can be doing a lot of other activities which are not directly marine maintenance activities.

And I believe that maybe we can imagine that to increase marine maintenance fees, some countries where a lot of cables are existing are contributing to the fees to the cable owner fees. So that countries provide grants to the cable owners to increase the price of the marine maintenance in order to renew the vessels and to get cash to renew the vessels. That’s my point for this subject.

Sure. I’m going to sound like a broken record, but I think really finding a pathway to reduce the permitting and regulatory challenges and getting those timelines just down. I think it’s within every government’s ability to do it.

We just need to put our heads down and do the work. And I would say, please partner with industry. We’ve been doing this for a long time and would welcome conversations on how we can do this in a way that benefits everybody.

We all want connectivity. Thank you.

And the same question to Mr. Zhang.

So as you said, in 2026, in terms of report, we have a very different ecosystem. So it’s challenges and issues. So my own personal observations, I think there are two challenges.

First, the ecosystem is facing an efficiency bottleneck. I think it’s a very important issue. Currently, global repair relies on maintenance areas, as you just said.

But according to studies by the industry, more than 60 % of stakeholders are not satisfied with response time of the green situation. So the industry generally said, as more countries are connected to cables, so the policy environment will become more and more complicated. The coordination costs will continue to rise, of course.

Often, different funders… …have different… management in terms of customs, maintenance, environment issues, and approval systems.

So this tendency, this timeline are very hard to predict. So the administration process is most important issue that results in delay in repairs. So the bottleneck in terms of administrative efficiency is about the unbalance between supply and demand in terms of repair resources.

And globally, repair ships are very limited, as you just said. And you all mentioned about how many repair ships in the world, and but anyway, there is an imbalance in terms of ship repair. So out of the 20 that are available, there are 20 on standby.

Whenever there is a natural hazard or any false event, current resources cannot satisfy multiple points in repair simultaneously. And many of the repair ships will be decommissioned by 2024 because of the end of life. And also the total kilometers of the submarine sea cable will increase by 40%.

So this disbalance in supply demand is going to shape the future of submarine cable repair. I believe these are the tremendous challenges we’re facing by 2026. In order to address these challenges, we’ll have to continue to optimize.

the regulatory environment, increase investment in repair. In addition, I also recommend to expedite the modernization of our equipment, R &D and repair ships in depth, and also AI -assisted repair technology. So we have to enhance our technology to increase productivity and to increase our repair capacity.

Technology is going to define and help us satisfy the demand, increase and address those challenges. We are also faced with an important issue in terms of talent development. As all of you here understand, talent engineers in maintenance repair is in fact in shortage.

They have to go through very stringent and rigorous education and development. So we must think about how we develop them. We have to enlarge our efforts in terms of developing educational programs related to engineers in sea cable repair and maintenance so as to systematically enhance the quality of our system.

Thank you.

Thank you very much. And Vincent, from your perspective, what’s the most important consideration for submarine cable repair in 2026?

So for me, the main point is renew the fleet. for sure and for that make sure that there is a business model for that.

I agree with much of what has been said, I think the key thing as the recommendations from the working groups that we published today say reduce barriers to resolving this when it goes wrong, sort of 9 -meh scenario, you can imagine a sort of complex break affecting multiple countries, multiple regulatory regimes being engaged and just delay upon delay that’s basically unnecessary so I urge everyone to have a look at their regimes, think about when it goes wrong, test it, plan it and then sort of improve and remove those barriers.

Thank you, and Rui

I agree with my panel colleagues, everything that has been said I agree with my panel colleagues, everything that has been said But I think also, and I have to underline that, translate the recommendations from IAB into practical scenarios is going to be the big challenge.

How can we translate what we recommended on each country? Because we are not talking about everybody. We’re talking about country by country, and that is the challenge.

I’m happy that I’m having the chairman of my regulator here because I’m already starting to lecture him to provide the support that I need. Thank you.

Superb. Thank you all. So I think we’ve got time for maybe one or two questions if they’re short.

So please, if you can raise your hands, just in the middle here. Thank you.

I’m Esther from Tanzania, Tanzanian Telecommunication Corporation. From a national resilience point of view, we’ve heard a lot about having resilience, multiple cables for diversity, and also having the best mechanism for repairs. What do you think the countries should mostly invest in?

The best mechanisms or more cable landing stations? And also, how can a country strike a balance between the two?

That’s a very good question. And who would like to take it? I’m looking maybe at Rui or…

I’ll have the others. Okay. Anybody else like to talk about it?

I’d say there’s no… I mean, I think there’s no kind of quick one -sentence answer. I think different countries have to…

look at their own individual circumstances and all will be different and make those sort of choices. I think there’s a lot of common understanding and there’s a lot of good information out there about what the features of a resilient connectivity looks like with we’ve discussed diversity of supply access to repair capability contingency planning for when things go wrong and I think the sort of the right balance on where you choose to invest depends on your starting point and the individual circumstances.

Thank you. And I think one more question and then we’ll have to wrap up in the middle here please.

Hi, Steve Song, Internet Society. During the cable break off the coast of West Africa in 2024, a key part of the restoration of services was actually finding a terrestrial route across West Africa. And so my question is really, is it reasonable to talk about undersea cable resilience without actually bringing terrestrial infrastructure into the picture?

What does undersea cable resilience look like for Uganda, for Zambia, for Rwanda, or Burundi? Are we missing – do we have only one half of the coin?

It’s a good question. It might be one for the third panel, I think, talking about those types of situations.

I think it’s a really good question because most of us tend to forget the terrestrial part. Terrestrial part is the part that is most important. It has to be part of the solution of the resilience of the submarine cable.

There’s no other way to do it, okay? Particularly when you have multiple landing stations in a country, if you don’t have tourist connectivity between the landing stations, cables are not going to be protected one to the other or resilient.

So it’s important. There’s a lot of initiatives, for example, I would say in Africa, some operators trying to connect the East Coast with the West Coast. It’s a big challenge because you’re talking about countries that have their own frameworks.

In some cases, you have civil wars going on in some regions, so it’s not easy, but it’s a good alternative, okay? Because if cables are breaking that goes along the South Africa Coast, by using the tourist coast, you’re still connecting the submarine cables that serve those areas as well. So for us, as a cable operator, we always consider the tourist part as a key.

And we always use as much as we can. Of course, submarine cables has a different quality of service, okay, reliability, and SLA than the terrestrial part. Terrestrial part, we are dealing with the multiple operators in most of the cases because each one owns one portion of the terrestrial fiber.

But it’s a good question. Thanks for that.

Great. Well, thank you all. Thank you for staying with us to the end, and thank you very much to all of our panelists.

A round of applause for them, please. Thank you.