Deep-Sea Cable Monitoring

Deep-sea cable monitoring is continuous surveillance of an installed submarine cable to detect faults, third-party contact, and anchor or trawl interference along its route. Distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) turns the cable’s own optical fiber into a dense array of vibration sensors, locating a disturbance to within tens of meters over distances reaching roughly 100 km per interrogator. Operators also use optical time-domain reflectometry for break location and AIS correlation to identify a suspect vessel. Monitoring matters for the roughly 1.4 million km of submarine cable carrying most intercontinental data, after incidents such as the 2024-2025 Baltic anchor-drag damage.