Summary

  • A repair ship’s availability does not end the delay: permission to work in coastal waters can sit between the fault report and the start of repair.
  • UNIDIR’s 2023 figures separate a 21-day mean from notification to departure, 7.5 days of mean transit and a 947-day maximum. The maximum is an outlier, not a normal repair or a permit-only measure.

Analysis: the clock before departure

Geoff Huston’s 14 October APNIC Blog essay says repair response times have more than doubled over a decade and that many days in the longest 2023 repair were spent waiting for permission. The essay is Huston’s analysis, not an APNIC policy decision. It makes a practical distinction visible: locating a cable fault may be technically precise, while authorizing a marine operation remains a decision by the relevant public authorities.

UNIDIR’s account of 2023 repair data gives the scale without collapsing the stages. It records 206 repairs across 136 coastal jurisdictions, a mean 21 days from notification to vessel departure, 7.5 days of average transit and a 947-day longest delay. The report lists several interacting causes: permits and other regulatory requirements, vessel or crew availability, backlogs, weather, security, supplies and the severity of the fault. The 947-day case cannot be assigned wholesale to a permit queue.

The regional finding is also bounded. UNIDIR says Asia-Pacific historically tended to have the longest mean time to commence repairs; it cites permitting in China and Indonesia alongside backlogs in China, India and Viet Nam. That is a historical pattern in the report, not a current ranking of every economy. A 2026 proceedings paper analyzes ICPC data across 137 countries, but it should not be combined with UNIDIR’s differently defined clock as if both measured the same interval.

UNIDIR cites a 2019 Singapore guidance note as a dated procedural example: expedited repair approvals were described with a 3–5 working-day window and a standard incident-notification schema. That shows an authority can specify a path and expected processing window; it does not establish present-day performance or a regional standard.

The operational question is therefore not simply whether a repair ship exists. A useful public record would timestamp initial notification, acknowledgement of a complete filing, authorization, vessel departure, arrival, repair start and traffic restoration. It would report medians and long-tail cases, and distinguish a permit wait from missing paperwork, a vessel backlog, weather or transit. ICPC says its global comparison uses anonymized data and is available by request, so the public page does not support claims about unseen country-level records.

Sources

APNIC Blog; UNIDIR; 2026 proceedings analysis; ICPC report page.