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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.

Its 6 cross-references, woven across the glossary's 18 categories
Cable ship: Infrastructure & data centers glossary illustration, AlgoPolis
Example

Hypothetical case: a subsea cable cut offshore waits for a cable ship to finish another repair. As long as the cable fleet does not grow in step with the cables laid, each cut waits longer for its ship, and the operator's business interruption lengthens accordingly.

Read next
Infrastructure & data centersSubmarine cable landing stationThe coastal point where a submarine cable meets the terrestrial network, a scarce and locatable link on which an entire country's connectivity can depend.Read the entry →Infrastructure & data centersSuspected sabotage of a submarine cableSevering of an undersea telecommunications cable by a vessel dragging its anchor, under circumstances that raise suspicion of a deliberate act rather than a navigation accident.Read the entry →Infrastructure & data centersSubmarine cable maintenance agreementA 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.Read the entry →
Related terms
Also known as

cable ship, cable-laying vessel, cable layer

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