Technical Conference: 07 - 11 March 2027
Exhibition: 09 - 11 March 2027
Los Angeles Convention Center | Los Angeles, California, United States

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Technical Conference: 07 - 11 March 2027
Exhibition: 09 - 11 March 2027
Los Angeles Convention Center | Los Angeles, California, United States

Home > 2026 Conference Programs > Short Courses

Modern Subsea Cable Systems

SC512 - Modern Subsea Cable Systems

15 Mar 2026
13:00 - 16:00

Short Course Level

Advanced Beginner

Short Course Description

Subsea cable systems have undergone significant evolution, driven by both surging traffic demands and continuous technological innovations. The capacity per cable has increased more than five orders of magnitude over the past 30 years.  The rapid expansion of global submarine cable networks demands not only the increase of cable capacity and decrease of cost-per-bit, but also more network flexibility and diversity over a range of transmission distances from hundreds of kilometers to over 10, 000 kilometers. The challenges and opportunities are present in many aspects of today’s subsea cable systems. 

This course discusses the following topics:

Part I: Overview of the subsea cables evolution, from legacy cable systems to widely deployed SDM (Space Division Multiplexing) cables, highlighting the cable building process from conceptual idea to live traffic service. 

Part II: Technical deep dive into the key components in building a subsea cable system, including both wet plant components (fiber, cable, power feeding equipment (PFE), repeater, branching unit (BU)/ROADM) and dry plant components (transponders, monitoring functions, backhaul extension, etc.). 
 
Part III: Discuss system design considerations for new cable system builds, existing cables’ capacity upgrades, and the latest industry standards.

Part IV: Highlights recent technical innovations in advancing subsea cable and some emerging subsea cable systems applications.

Short Course Benefits

This course should enable the participants to 
•    Review the brief history of subsea cable system development
•    Learn the process of building a subsea cable system from idea to live traffic service
•    Explore the building blocks of subsea cable systems and state-of-the-art technology
•    Discuss system design considerations in building a new cable design and upgrading a legacy cable
•    Explore the recent technological innovations and new applications in subsea cable 

Short Course Audience

This advanced-beginner course is intended for a diverse audience interested in modern subsea cable systems. A basic knowledge of fiber optics will help in better understanding the course but is not a prerequisite.

Instructor

  • Mei Du

    Tata Communications, United States

    About the Instructor

    Mei Du has been working on subsea cable upgrades to 40G/s, 100Gb/s and above on numerous legacy cables.  In recent years, she has worked on building several new consortium cables from concept to lighting live traffic. She received her Ph.D from the University of Chicago, studying femtosecond spectroscopy. She started her telecommunication career in Lucent Bell labs, working on forward pumping distributed Raman amplification, pump-design for forward pumping Raman amplification and high-speed transmission from 40Gb/s to 100Gb/s.  Her interests then shifted to bringing advanced technologies into real-world applications. She was involved in an agile photonic-network design and developed in-service dispersion monitoring and transient control.  She was involved in deploying a 100Gb/s national network and conducted a SDN-enabled 400GE field trial. In subsea applications, she worked on remote-pumped EDFA and forward pumped distributed Raman research.