Alcatel Submarine Networks Brand Guidelines: Calais, Greenwich & French State Ownership

A French cable group and a Thames-side works.

Alcatel Submarine Networks, usually shortened to ASN, designs, makes, lays and maintains submarine telecommunications cable systems. Its headquarters is at Paris-Les Ulis, south of Paris, and it makes cable at two long-established factories, in Calais on the French coast and at Greenwich in London. The company describes itself as having more than 165 years of history, and since November 2024 the French State has owned 80% of it.

That history arrives through two lines. English Wikipedia traces the British side to the Submarine Telegraph Company of the 1850s and to the Greenwich factory at Enderby’s Wharf on the Thames, where, it says, submarine cables had been made since 1857. The French side runs through the Compagnie Générale des Câbles de Lyon, which the Compagnie Générale d’Électricité (CGE) absorbed in 1925. The sources read for this guide do not describe what these French businesses did during the German occupation of 1940 to 1944. When CGE renamed itself Alcatel Alsthom in 1991, its cable business became Alcatel Câble.

The two lines met in 1993, when, according to English and French Wikipedia, Alcatel Câble bought STC Submarine Systems, then a division of Northern Telecom Europe, together with its Greenwich factory. In June 1994 Alcatel gathered its submarine telecommunications work in a new company, Alcatel Submarine Systems, owned 51% by Alcatel Câble and 49% by Alcatel CIT. When Alcatel Câble became Nexans on 9 October 2000, Alcatel kept the submarine business, which traded as Alcatel Submarine Networks.

Ships named after islands.

Laying cable takes ships, and ASN names its ships after French islands. In 2000, English Wikipedia says, it formed ALDA Marine with the shipowner Louis Dreyfus Armateurs to build, own and run a cable fleet; when the partnership was renewed in 2015, ASN’s parent took ownership of all seven ships, with Louis Dreyfus Armateurs operating them. The company’s fleet page lists seven vessels, from Île de Sein and Île de Bréhat to Île d’Yeu and Île de Molène, the last two joining in 2021. French Wikipedia says five lay cable and two are used for maintenance, and that Île de Sein, Île de Bréhat and Île de Batz are sister ships built in South Korea by Hyundai Mipo Dockyard in 2001 and 2002. Île d’Yeu, it adds, was bought from Subsea 7 in June 2021 as the Seven Mar and christened at La Rochelle on 13 June 2023.

The name followed the telecoms groups above it. After Alcatel completed its purchase of Lucent Technologies on 1 December 2006, the unit became Alcatel-Lucent Submarine Networks. Nokia announced its purchase of Alcatel-Lucent in April 2015, which brought the submarine business into the Finnish group, and in 2017 it went back to the name Alcatel Submarine Networks. In 2014 it had bought Optoplan, a Norwegian business working on seabed oil-field monitoring that had belonged to the French group CGG; ASN’s leadership page today lists a site director in Trondheim, Norway.

Project work in the Wikipedia accounts includes the West Africa Cable System. ASN signed the supply contract on 8 April 2009; on 15 July 2010 Île de Bréhat left the Calais factory loaded with nearly 6,000 km of cable; and laying ended on 19 April 2011 with the landing at Yzerfontein in South Africa. By 1 January 2022, English Wikipedia says, ASN had laid more than 700,000 km of cable, was maintaining more than 300,000 km and had commissioned more than 200 fibre-optic systems.

Design and documentation.

Optical fibre and submarine cable are hard things to picture. The working product is a strand of glass thinner than a hair, or a cable that spends its life on the seabed, so the companies that make them borrow images from the process instead. The most familiar is the fibre itself: glowing strands fanned out against a dark ground, light running along their length and spilling from the cut ends.

Factory pictures come next. Fibre makers show preform towers, the tall draw towers where a glass rod is heated and pulled into fibre, and long rows of spools. Submarine cable makers show their ships: cable ships alongside a quay, giant circular tanks of coiled cable in the hold, and ploughs or remotely operated vehicles lowered over the stern. World maps traced with submarine routes, each line ending at a landing point on a coast, carry the same story on a website or a trade-show wall.

People appear mostly at work. Technicians splice fibre inside clean tents on a deck or a beach, engineers check repeaters on a test bench, and crews guide cable ashore at a landing site. The trade also has its own stages, such as the OFC conference for optical communications and the SubOptic conference for the submarine cable industry, where the same strands, cross-sections and route maps return on booths and slides.

This guide looks past those shared images to what can be checked about each company: who founded it, who owns it now, where it makes its fibre or cable, which systems it is known for, and which events in its history, from mergers to changes of owner, shaped the name it trades under. Where a claim rests only on a company’s own word, we say so.

Under French State ownership since 2024.

Nokia announced on 27 June 2024 that it had signed a put option with the French State, acting through the Agence des participations de l’État (APE), for the sale of ASN. It followed earlier talks between Nokia and the French company Ekinops about a sale of the business, which, English Wikipedia says, ended in April 2019. Nokia said it would keep a 20% shareholding and seats on the board until a later exit, when the State would acquire the rest. Solutions Numériques reported on 7 November 2024 that the purchase of 80% of the company had been signed at the Calais factory on 5 November 2024, with the economy minister present.

ASN now describes itself as 80% owned by the APE. In March 2026 it announced a three-year plan, running from 2026 to 2028, to modernise the Calais and Greenwich factories for next-generation cable, including the renovation and expansion of a building in Calais and the fit-out of a new building in Greenwich. The company says it has deployed more than 850,000 km of submarine optical systems, which it puts at about 21 times the Earth’s circumference, and it names telecom operators, content and service providers, and offshore oil and gas projects among its customers.

For a design guide, ASN shows how a business name can follow its owners: Alcatel, then Alcatel-Lucent, then Alcatel again under Nokia and now the French State, while the ships keep their island names and the two factories keep making cable. Compare Nexans, the former Alcatel Câble, and Nokia, the owner from 2016 to 2024. For this guide we use a channel blue, a warm sand and a buoy red with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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