Newington’s SubCom a worldwide provider of undersea fiber optic systems

Sep 23, 2023

NEWINGTON — The information highway is built on high-speed fiber optic cables, and when it comes to constructing that highway along the ocean floor, SubCom in Newington is the world's leading supplier of the technology.

On average, the company produces 24,855 miles of fiber optic cable per year at the Newington facility on Piscataqua Drive. In 10 years at that average, the company has made enough of the cable to reach the moon, which is 238,900 miles from earth.

"Newington is where we do all our manufacturing. We start by manufacturing the optical sub-assemblies that go into our optical repeaters. We also do all of the cable manufacturing here," said Daniel Sousa, SubCom's managing director of manufacturing operations.

The company describes itself as "the leading global partner for today's undersea data transport requirements. SubCom designs, manufactures, deploys, maintains and operates the industry's most reliable fiber optic cable networks. Its flexible solutions include repeaterless to ultra-long-haul, offshore oil and gas, scientific applications, and marine services. SubCom brings end-to-end network knowledge and global experience to support on-time delivery, and meet the needs of customers worldwide."

The raw materials are woven together into the fiber cable, and the cable is integrated with the optical repeaters (used to regenerate a signal to the next length of cable).

"The entire network and cable system has to be integrated and put together and tested before it leaves the manufacturing facility and before it can be loaded onto our vessels for deployment," Sousa said.

The term applied to cable strung along the ocean floor is "submarine," an adjective not to be confused with the noun submarine.

SubCom (www.subcom.com) has three primary locations: Eatontown, New Jersey, where the majority of research and development is done; Baltimore, Maryland, where its maritime division with the cable-laying ships is located, and the Newington plant, which has been in operation since 1953.

It started, according to Sousa, by making coaxial cable networks for telecommunications, mostly for government contracts.

"It was in the 80s that we actually went into the fiber optic network," he added.

SubCom has operated under several corporate brands over the years. In March 2010, it started operating under the name Tyco Electronics Subsea Communications (TE SubCom). In September 2018, Cerberus Capital Management, L.P., acquired TE's Subsea Communication, now SubCom.

"That's a long, long history of innovation there," said Courtney McDaniel, director of marketing communications at SubCom.

Optical fiber, because of the speed that it can transmit a high volume of data, is a preferred method of transmitting internet communication, telephone signals and cable television content.

Building an optical fiber network on terra firma is one thing, building a submarine network is quite another and one for which SubCom is best known.

To date, the company has deployed more than 200 networks – enough undersea cable to circle the Earth more than 17 times at the equator – for not only internet providers and companies but also offshore oil and gas, scientific applications and marine services.

Most recently, Google announced SubCom as its partner in the development and deployment of the Grace Hopper subsea cable, linking the United States, United Kingdom and Spain. It is named for computer science groundbreaker Grace Brewster Murray Hopper (1906-1992), best known for her work in the development of the COBOL programming language.

Expected to be completed in 2022, according to Google, the Grace Hopper cable will be one of the first new cables to connect the U.S. and U.K. since 2003, increasing capacity on this busy highway and powering Google services such as Meet, Gmail and Google Cloud.

"Grace Hopper will incorporate novel optical fiber switching that allows for increased reliability in global communications, enabling us to better move traffic around outages. Google and SubCom engineers collaborated on incorporating this innovative switching architecture into the system," Google said in a statement. "Grace Hopper is the world's first submarine cable to use this technology, and we look forward to deploying the technology on other systems in the future."

SubCom has had other Google contracts, including the Curie submarine cable between the U.S. and Chile. (See a Google video of that project at www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltE37wwbU9g&feature=youtu.be)

A submarine system, once ready, is hand laid into a storage tank at the SubCom facility. One of the highly specialized seven ships from its maritime division in Baltimore then comes up the Piscataqua River to the SubCom dock. The cable is then conveyed from the facility storage tank to a storage tank on the ship via a 1,000 foot enclosed "high line." The cable is also wound by hand into the vessel's tank.

"We're basically doing a tank to tank transfer in preparation for deployment," Sousa said.

Generally, once the environmentally neutral cable is deployed from the ship, it rests on the sea bottom in open ocean and is buried closer to shore, particularly in high traffic areas. It is buried using one of two methods – a sea plow, which is towed behind the cable ship, or a remote operated vehicle (ROV).

The ROV can do what is called a "PLIB" – the post lay inspection and burial. The ROV inspects, buries the cable using water jets and re-inspects the laid cable.

"Our engineering team does a very detailed roadmap of how the cable is to be laid, so we have a very specific lay plan that the ship follows when they're putting the cable into the ocean floor," Sousa said. "It's very well thought out and considerations are made for the most effective path, which minimizes risk."

SubCom currently has some 800 employees at its manufacturing headquarters in Newington and approximately 1,400 employees globally.

"The positions range from engineering positions, including mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, optical engineering and process engineering. And then we also have a lot of manufacturing roles – engineering technicians, supervisors and then we have obviously manufacturing operators," Sousa said.

"We’re very proud of this operation here," he added.

Sousa said the company is looking for new hires in just about all its departments.