wiredInUSA January 2018

Copper replacement plan brought forward

Cable burials at sea

SBSS has announced multiple contracts across the submarine telecommunications and subsea oil and gas markets in Indonesia. PT Saipem has awarded SBSS the full cable installation scope for the BP Tangguh Phase 2 project, including the submarine installation and burial of 60km of composite power cables, to connect offshore platforms to gas production facilities. The project is scheduled for delivery in late 2018. SBSS executed Phase 1 of the BP Tangguh project almost ten years ago. The company has also been engaged to deliver two separate projects in the telecommunications sector. Demanding a combined 2,800km of fiber optic cables for installation and burial, both projects are currently in progress and will see the SBSS installation fleet occupied into 2018.

The Bangkok Post reports that Thailand’s state telecom enterprise, TOT, plans to install fiber optic lines to replace copper wires nationwide by 2021, five years ahead of its original plan. The move is primarily to serve the government’s efforts to switch from nine-digit fixed-line numbers to ten digits by 2021, to deal with increases in mobile service demand. TOT president Monchai Noosong said the company has set a budget to install the fiber optic lines. The government plans to increase the digits of fixed-line numbers across the country to ten by inserting a 1 after the existing 0 prefix of each number. After implementation, total phone numbers will increase by 550 million numbers, with 500 million reserved for mobile service and 50 million for fixed- line numbers. Mr Monchai said the plan to remove TOT’s copper wires nationwide sooner than originally planned has indirectly resulted in the conpany scrapping its earlier plan of establishing the infrastructure fund for underground pipes. “Many copper wires were laid out in TOT’s underground pipes across the country, so when the existing copper wires are removed and replaced with fiber optic lines, there will be more space to serve network expansion in the future.”

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wiredInUSA - January 2018