Cable repair ship
termISP & telecom
A specialised vessel held on standby under regional maintenance agreements to repair submarine cable faults - locating the break, grappling the cable off the seabed, splicing new fibre aboard, testing, and returning it to the bottom.
The fleet is small, partly ageing and geographically concentrated, and it is the real constraint on recovery time. A typical repair runs one to several weeks: sailing time, weather, depth and queueing behind other faults all add up. Permits to work in another state's waters routinely add more, which is why some outages last far longer than the engineering requires - the delay is diplomatic. Any resilience plan that assumes fast physical repair has not looked at the fleet.
Also known as: cable ship, grapnel, splice at sea, maintenance agreement