Challenger, the new undersea telecommunications cable, will certainly live up to its name when it is installed between Bermuda and the US later this year.

Bermudian Ray Charlton is the man who has been charged with overseeing the laying of the 870-mile cable from the American mainland in New York to the Island and he is looking forward to the challenge of delivering the project on time and to budget.

Mr. Charlton, who is the cable station manager for Cable Co. (Challenger) Ltd., the company formed by North Rock Communications, KeyTech and Transact in a bid to provide a more competitive marketplace and more customer choice, will see the implementation of the cable through from start to finish.

The project began in earnest more than two years ago with the company undergoing 18 months of negotiations with vendors and consultants, before applying for and finally being granted an international Class A public telecommunications service licence, needed to build the new submarine cable, by Government's Department of Telecommunications and E-Commerce in December 2007.

In April this year, Cable Co. carried out two surveys — an inshore survey to find a path for the cable through the reefs that it is environmentally friendly, and a deep water route survey to map the terrain and determine the route it should take from the US to Bermuda.

The following month, the company met up with the contractors for the project, Alcatel, in Greenwich, London to go through the status of the onshore and off-shore work and agreed upon the route, and the equipment that will be used, and is now ready to mobilise the ship to lay the cable.

Mr. Charlton, who came on board with Cable Co. in February, has been busy preparing the Bermuda and US ends of the operation for receiving Alcatel at two locations on the Island, the cable station and the 'meet me' room at the BTC Hamilton Exchange where customers can access the system, and meeting with Verizon Business in the US, which is the vendor appointed to maintain the cable.

The whole project is expected to be completed in early 2009.

A crew of around 12 crew and 12 fitters will be working around the clock in 24-hour shifts on board The Intercepter out of Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Baltimore in the US, to install the cable, which can range from one inch to three-and-a-half inches thick with a capacity of up to 320 Gigabits. The cable will start off with a traffic of 20 Gbs with the option to add more capacity if its is required, with Bermuda only having an anticipated usage of four Gps.

"The thickness of the cable depends on what terrain it is laying on," said Mr. Charlton.

"The cable is at its thickest when it leaves Bermuda at three-and-a-half inches in diameter, so there is no threat of trawler damage and little threat of anchor damage, and it then goes into deep water quite quickly where it is laid six to seven inches deep, and a quarter of a mile off shore the cable is just over an inch thick.

"The cable is protected by an articulated cast iron piping, which secures the cable in place against hurricanes and storm surges and helps to naturally bury itself with the tides and currents that come. For an international submarine cable there is also a fishing exclusion zone a mile either side of the cable."

The cable has a 25-year life span with 99.9 percent reliability and can pinpoint any faults to between 100 to 200 feet, while Cable Co. signed up to the Atlantic Maintenance Agreement to keep the cable in good working order.

The implementation of the new cable certainly looks to be in good hands with Mr. Charlton, who hails from Somerset originally and was a manager at Cable & Wireless, being involved in a number of big cable installation projects. These included working for WorldCom on the Gemini North Cable between Rhode Island in the US and Oxwich Bay in Wales in June 1999 during the dot-com boom and the South Cross from Morro Bay in California to Japan, via Hawaii, New Zealand, Australia and Fiji three years later.

And Mr. Charlton has not forgotten his roots, taking a number of Bermudians from BTC along with staff from Verizon Business on a training course on the operation and maintenance of the cable system at an Alcatel facility in France for three weeks next month, before sending them off for on a hands-on experience at the cable station in Bermuda and in the US for three to four weeks.