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Cable ship

A vessel specialized in laying and repairing submarine cables, whose global scarcity governs the true duration of any cut.

Definition

A cable ship is a specialized, rare and costly vessel tasked with laying and repairing submarine cables. There are roughly sixty in the whole world, operating on call, for a network of nearly 1.7 million kilometers. The severity of a fault therefore depends not on its cause but on the availability of these ships, which brings the cable close to another critical infrastructure, the extra-high-voltage transformer, whose outage duration is read in an order book rather than on a probability curve.

Example

Without expanding the cable fleet, median restoration times risk durably exceeding the current forty-day benchmark.

Related terms
Also known as

câblier, cable-laying ship