FEATURE
SUBSEA CABLES
THE PRICE OF FAME F
or my generation of cable people explaining our job to friends or even families as to why we spent many unsocial hours on conference calls or continually on airliners was often met with ‘Really, isn’t it all done by satellite nowadays?’ Few would react that way today, our once most discrete industry is often in the public eye. Even as I am editing this cable issues are making Sunday paper headlines, fame there is but does it come at a price for the industry and perhaps even society at large. That’s a question too big for me to answer alone and I have been helped enormously by the responses from the contributors highlighted and their opinions from industry and academic perspectives. As an introduction: Erick Contag, Executive Chairman Globenet and Trustee of the SubOptic Foundation. “One of SubOptic’s main pillars is awareness. We believe awareness is critical to attract new talent to our industry but also to bring into the spotlight how critical Submarine cable systems are to the global communications fabric.
BY JOHN TIBBLES
One of the unintended - positive - consequences during the early stages of the pandemic in 2020 is how acutely aware governments became of this critical digital infrastructure, resulting in some cases in much faster emergency permitting associated with cable repairs. We simply can’t be virtually connected across continents, holding endless hours of high quality and low latency video conferences, trading stocks in real time, or transferring petabytes of data without fiber optic subsea cable systems.”
TO OBLIVION AND BACK
In August 1858, the first commercial transatlantic telegraph cable started service It now took an hour to send and receive a message when it used to take weeks. It transformed commerce. In the 1950s cables could carry voice calls across the oceans, at a price, but much more clearly than HF radio. However, if you wanted to spend the money you could call your business partner in New York or your granny in Melbourne but only if you both lived in a country that had the new coaxial systems- no coastline no cable. Cables are not by any means new! JANUARY 2022 | ISSUE 122
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