Subsea Cablers Hope New Administration Brings Longed-for Permit Streamlining
Facing what it sees as an onerous and lengthy process of submarine cable system licensing and permitting, the submarine cable industry is hoping the new White House administration offers a path to streamlining and speedier turnarounds. The FCC approval process used to be roughly 14 months, but now it sometimes reaches two years, said Sarah McComb, Amazon Web Services (AWS) principal business developer overseeing its undersea cable development activity in the Pacific. "That's just too long," she told an Information Technology and Innovation Foundation webinar Wednesday.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Communications Daily is required reading for senior executives at top telecom corporations, law firms, lobbying organizations, associations and government agencies (including the FCC). Join them today!
Ansley Erdel of Salt Point Strategies, representing the subsea cable industry's International Connectivity Coalition (ICC), said the Commerce Department and its NTIA having a greater role in evaluating cable network applications by the Committee for the Assessment of Foreign Participation in the U.S. Telecommunications Service Sector -- known informally as Team Telecom -- could help provide a stronger economic advocacy voice among the national security deliberations. The Team Telecom executive order in President Donald Trump's first administration (see 2004060071) tried to streamline that evaluation process, and ICC goals seem to align with the president's interest in greater efficiency, she said.
Even a short delay in regulatory OK can mean a much longer delay in the project, because of issues like weather and ship availability, McComb said. Laying cable in the winter across the northern Pacific "is just not happening," she said.
Meanwhile, some nations -- such as Singapore and especially Australia -- are less challenging in their regulatory processes as they try to attempt cable landings and related investments, said Brent Bombach, NEC Corp. of America head-government relations and public policy.
One challenge is ensuring enough cable capacity to meet the coming demand, McComb said. The time from conception of a cable system to completion was three years but now is closer to five, with permitting being a major reason for that increased delay, she said. Beyond deployment of new systems, maintenance and repairs of existing cables could also have easier permitting, she added.
Grace Koh, Ciena vice president-government relations, urged more international harmonization of licensing regimes to help speed deployments. She said an EU-wide or North American agreement would help.
President Joe Biden's administration was active in greater information sharing, and the hope is that trend continues under Trump, Bombach said. He also said there's hope the Trump administration will continue the Biden White House's work with Japan and Australia on using trunk lines to connect underserved areas, like Palau.
Subsea cable systems were once largely the work of consortiums of telecommunications carriers, often in joint ventures, Bombach said. Increasingly, hyperscalers, like Google, Meta and AWS, with their massive cloud services and data centers, are the direct owners and operators of cable systems or are consortium members, he said.
McComb said that while traditionally, subset cable systems didn't provide great investment returns, investment funds and banks are increasingly interested. She said governments are also providing low-interest loans.
Speakers didn't directly address the FCC's open subsea cable proceeding; commissioners unanimously approved an NPRM in November, proposing revisions to its licensing rules (see 2411210006).