12.06.2025
Redefining Resilience in the Subsea Cable Industry
From June 2–5, the Oceans & Cables management team proudly participated in SubOptic 2025, held at the Lisbon Congress Centre in Portugal. As the world’s longest-running and most comprehensive submarine telecoms conference, SubOptic continues to be a cornerstone event for the global subsea cable community, bringing together visionaries, engineers, academics, and industry leaders from around the world.
This year’s theme, “What’s on the horizon? Future-proofing our digital landscape,” directly aligns with our company’s mission to support the development of secure, resilient, and sustainable subsea infrastructure. At a time when digital connectivity underpins everything from global commerce to national security, the submarine cable industry is at the forefront of addressing challenges posed by AI-driven growth, climate change, evolving regulatory environments, and geopolitical instability.
One of the highlights of the conference for Oceans & Cables was the opportunity to contribute to the event’s rich academic and technical dialogue. On 4th June, Dr Gabriele Olivieri, PhD student at Sapienza Università di Roma, took the stage on behalf of Oceans & Cables to present “Redundancy ≠ Resilience.”
The presentation explored the nuanced but critical difference between redundancy and resilience in subsea networks.
Redundancy, often understood as the duplication of components to ensure system stability, is not synonymous with resilience, the adaptive capacity of a system to withstand and recover from disruptions without losing functionality.
If resilience is defined as the ability of a system to adapt to a state variation while maintaining functionality, it should be considered how among such state variations one should also include new cables, not only those that have been damaged or are no longer in operation. In conclusion, to optimise the degree of resilience of the global interconnection system, we don’t need more cables, but the right cables.
With society’s growing dependency on the Internet, the role of subsea cables as critical infrastructure has never been more vital. SubOptic 2025 posed a powerful challenge to the industry: to look forward and anticipate not just the technological advancements ahead, but also the vulnerabilities that come with them.
Oceans & Cables is proud to be part of this important dialogue, contributing our expertise and insights into how the global subsea cable network can become more agile, secure, and future-ready.
As we return from Lisbon, we carry with us renewed inspiration, valuable connections, and a deepened commitment to innovation in the field of submarine cable installation and consultancy.
To those we met at the conference, thank you for the engaging conversations and shared vision.
The future of subsea communications is being shaped today, and Oceans & Cables is proud to help build it.
Oceans & Cables Limited is a company based in Malta, founded in 2014, operating in the submarine cable industry and related technical services, working with various industries and markets globally. Our specialisation is in the consultancy, planning and implementation of the submarine cable industry for governmental entities, commercial corporations, and offshore renewable energy companies around the world. For more information about Oceans & Cables, please contact us on info@oceanscables.com.
Article written by Ms Charlene Sciberras, Director at Oceans & Cables Limited.