SC512 - Modern Subsea Cable Systems
15 Mar 2026
13:00 - 16:00
Short Course Level
Advanced Beginner
Short Course Description
From the first fiber optic subsea cable to today’s SDM cable system, the capacity per cable has increased 5 orders of magnitudes over the past 30 years. This exponential increase has been driven by ever-growing traffic demands and has been enabled by enormous technological advances in every subsea cable building block. 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 over a range of transmission distances from hundreds of kilometers to over 10,000 kilometers. The challenges are present in many aspects of today’s subsea cable systems. This course discusses key components in building out a subsea cable system from concept to service, and reviews recent technical innovations that have advanced the cable performance, as well as new applications of subsea cable systems.
In the first part, this course provides an overview of the evolution of subsea cables from legacy to recently widely deployed SDM (Space Division Multiplexing) cables and highlights the cable building process from conceptual idea to traffic service. In the second part, this course addresses 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.). In the third part, this course discusses system considerations for both new cable design and existing cable capacity upgrades. Finally, this course highlights recent technical innovations in advancing subsea cable to meet the future need and some new applications of subsea cable systems.
Short Course Benefits
This course should enable participants to discuss and explore the subsea cable systems in terms of its key building components and its system design considerations in new cable design and in legacy cable upgrade.
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.
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Mei Du
Tata Communications, United States
Mei Du 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 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 a100Gb/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 and deployed 40G/s (2009) and 100G /s (2012) on trans-Atlantic legacy cable. In recent years, she has worked on numerous legacy cable upgrades and on building
several new consortium cables.