The Undersea Cable History
A history of Transatlantic Communications
The first transoceanic connection in 1858 was operational for only a few weeks and enabled Queen Victoria to send birthday greetings to then U.S. President James Buchanan. The Atlantic Telegraph Company, led by Cyrus West Field, began work in 1854 and was completed in 1858. The second transatlantic cable was laid by the SS Great Eastern in 1866.
An iron sail-powered, paddle wheel, and screw-propelled steamship was designed by English engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel. It was the largest ship ever built at the time of her 1858 launch.
Originally a passenger ship before being contracted out for cable laying in 1865, she was converted to hold 22,450 kilometers (13,950 mi) of cable. After a successful laying project across the Atlantic, the Great Eastern continued to lay and repair subsea telegraph cables until the 1880s. Later re-fitted as a liner, then a showboat, and then used for advertising, she was scrapped in 1890.
The CS Hooper, built in 1873 in Newcastle, was the world’s first purpose-built cable-laying ship. It was designed to carry the whole of the cable to be laid between England and Bermuda for the Great Western Telegraph Company, however the project was abandoned. It laid a number of cables for the company before it was sold to the India Rubber, Gutta Percha and Telegraph Works in 1881 and renamed Silvertown.
A series of dedicated cable ships, including the CS Faraday, followed shortly after the Hooper. The CS H. C. Oersted, built for the Great Northern Telegraph Company in Denmark in 1872, was the first ship specifically designed for cable repair.
The first trans-Pacific telegraph cable from San Francisco in the US via Hawaii, Midway, and Guam to Manila in the Philippines, and onto China and Japan, was laid around 1901–2 by the India Rubber, Gutta Percha and Telegraph Works Company using CS Silvertown (previously the Hooper), and the Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company (Telcon) using CS Colonia and CS Anglia, two custom-built ships.
The first submarine transatlantic telephone cable system, TAT-1, was laid between Oban, Scotland, and Clarenville, Newfoundland in the 1950s by the cable ship HMTS Monarch, a successor to the original Monarch and built in 1946.
TAT-8, the first transatlantic fiber optic cable, landing in Tuckerton, New Jersey, Widemouth Bay, England, and Penmarch, France, was laid in 1988 by CS Long Lines (owned by AT&T), CS Alert (BT), and CS Vercors (French Telecom, now Orange).
Today, undersea cables transmit 99% of all transcontinental internet traffic, including instant messenger chats, stock market transactions and military secrets.
There are only four major companies in the world that manufacture and lay subsea cables: America’s SubCom, Japan’s NEC, France’s Alcatel Submarine Networks and China’s HMN Tech.
SubCom is one of the world’s biggest developers of undersea fiber-optic cables for telecom firms and tech giants like Alphabet’s Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta Platforms. SubCom’s fleet operates six cable-laying ships: state-of-the-art deep-sea vessels fitted with vast storage drums to hold sheaves of fiber-optic cable.
Submarine cables are typically about the diameter of an average human arm. They enclose hair-thin optical fibers coated with polyethylene, copper and water-resistant aluminum.
In 2020, SubCom announced it had been commissioned by an Australian tech mogul to lay a $300 million commercial internet cable from Australia to the Sultanate of Oman on the Arabian Peninsula, a route that traverses the Indian Ocean.
The project, known as the Oman Australia Cable, was spearheaded by SUBCO, a Brisbane-based subsea cable investment company owned by Australian entrepreneur Bevan Slattery.
Cables are typically owned by a consortium of telecom and tech companies that spread the cost and risk.
Occasionally, entrepreneurs or private equity firms build a cable on spec with the aim of selling bandwidth to carriers and tech companies before selling the cable for a profit.
The 10,000-kilometer cable was officially opened by Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in October 2022. Capable of 120,000 exabytes per second, OAC is fast enough to stream over 65 million movies on Netflix simultaneously, and it will make Western Australia a critical data hub.
The world’s longest fiber optic cable (28,000 miles) serves three billion people in Africa, Europe and Asia.
Visit https://www.iscpc.org/
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