Submarine cable maintenance agreement
A pooling arrangement in which the owners of cables in a sea zone jointly fund cable ships on standby, ready to sail and repair any member's cable.
A severed submarine cable can only be repaired by a cable ship, and there are too few of them for each owner to keep one. Operators therefore band together by sea zone in maintenance agreements: they jointly pay a fixed fee that keeps one or more ships on standby, with crews, underwater robots and stocks of compatible cable and joints, and each repair is then billed to the member that calls for it. The Atlantic, the Mediterranean and Asia each have their own agreements, some cooperative and some commercial. The mechanism turns an uncertain response time into a contractual one, but it has limits: the standby ship may be busy on another fault, a non-member cable waits in line behind members, and several simultaneous cuts in one zone exhaust capacity. For an operator's insurer, membership in an agreement and the number of ships it covers bear directly on the likely length of an outage.
The Atlantic Cable Maintenance Agreement brings together about sixty members for cable repairs in the North and South Atlantic, the English Channel, the North Sea and the Caribbean; its 2017 version, contracted to Global Marine and Orange Marine starting January 1, 2017, was extended in November 2020 through the end of December 2025. In June 2019, the power company Ørsted joined as the first renewable energy member, with access to the standby vessel CS Sovereign for the cables of its UK offshore wind farms.
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