In the media and public discourse, companies like Alphabet, Apple, and Microsoft are often lumped together into the same “Big Tech” category. It turns out that undersea telecom cables make a very effective seismic network, helping researchers study offshore earthquakes and the geologic structures on the ocean floor. Even though signals are no longer traveling through this network of “dark fiber”, it’s still being put to productive use. A Bright Future for Dark FiberĪt the same time, more aging cables will be taken offline. While laying cable is a costly endeavor, it’s necessary to meet surging demand-content providers’ share of data transmission skyrocketed from around 8% to nearly 40% over the past decade. These three companies now own 63,605 miles of submarine cable. Traditionally, a consortium of telecom companies or governments would fund cable construction, but tech companies are increasingly funding their own submarine cable networks.Īmazon, Microsoft and Google own close to 65% market share in cloud data storage, so it’s understandable that they’d want to control the physical means of transporting that data as well. New cables are so efficient that the majority of potential capacity along major cable routes will come from cables that are less than five years old. This is due to the increasing capacity of new cables and our appetite for high-quality video content. The Shifting Nature of Cable ConstructionĮven though nearly every corner of the globe is now physically connected, the rate of cable construction is not slowing down. *TAT-8 does not appear in the video above as it was retired in 2002. Now, even the most remote Polynesian islands have access to high-speed internet thanks to undersea cables. In 2001 alone, eight new cables connected North America and Europe.įrom 2016-2020, over 100 new cables were laid with an estimated value of $14 billion. The physical network of the internet was beginning to take shape.Īs today’s video from ESRI shows, the early 2000s saw a boom in undersea cable development, reflecting the uptick in internet usage around globe. ![]() By the dawn of the new millennium, every populated continent on Earth was connected by fiber optic cables. During the course of the 1990s, many more cables hit the ocean floor. Once the kinks of the new cable were worked out, the floodgates were open. The cable was able to carry the equivalent of 40,000 telephone channels, a ten-fold increase over its galvanic predecessor, TAT-7. The cable-known as TAT-8*-was spearheaded by three companies AT&T, France Télécom, and British Telecom. The first intercontinental fiber optic cable was strung across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean in 1988. Throughout the 1960-70s, companies made gains in manufacturing, reducing the number of impurities and allowing light to cross great distances without a dramatic decrease in signal intensity.īy the mid-1980s, long distance fiber optic cables had finally reached the feasibility stage. The next step to using fiber optics as a means of communication was lowering the cable’s attenuation rate. His explorations into the behavior of light eventually led to the creation of fiber optics-essentially, beaming light through a thin glass tube. The young physicist was skeptical when his professors asserted that light ‘always travels in a straight line’. The miracle of modern fiber optics can be traced to a single man, Narinder Singh Kapany. How did the internet get so fast? Because it’s moving at the speed of light. Now, even high-quality video is instantly accessible from almost everywhere. ![]() Long gone are the days when images would load pixel row by pixel row. You could be reading this article from nearly anywhere in the world and there’s a good chance it loaded in mere seconds.
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