A collapsed ring fiber optic system includes a service path and a protection path provides at a shallow water portion of the fiber optic system, to deal with any fiber cuts that may occur at the shallow water portion without loss of main trunk bandwidth. The service and protection paths meet at a branch point, which is preferably located at a deep water portion of the fiber optic system. A passive combiner or a 1×2 switch is provided at the branch unit, along with a detector and a processor, to determine whether any signals are being received from the service path, and if not, to reconfigure the system to accept signals from the protection path. At another shallow water portion of the fiber optic system, nearby where a destination is located, the signal provided on the optical path over the deep water portion is split into a service path and a protection path, to provide redundancy to deal with any fiber cuts that may occur. The fiber optic system may also be utilized for a land-based system, having high probability of fiber cut regions and low probability of fiber cut regions.