FRIDAY SURPRISE: What's old is new again.

Friday, April 10, 2009 Filed in: Friday Surprise!, Completely irrelevant, Technology

It may surprise you to learn that the vast majority of transatlantic data traffic - phone calls, email, internet connections - doesn't go through satellites. Instead, most of those bits and bytes goes under the water through long cables stretched between the continents. Sounds awfully low-tech, doesn't it?

When the first undersea cables were laid, traffic was in the form of the telegraph message. Later, as the telephone became prominent, voice channels were added. There were some attempts to use radio to carry communications across the sea, but cables on the seabed were still the way most Americans kept in touch with Europe. It was that way up until the mid-1960s, when the first communications satellites were launched.

The satellite was the darling of data travel, and for a time it looked like underwater cables would be relegated to the back of the communications bus. By the early '80s, over half of all overseas traffic was carried on satellites, with more space-based capacity planned. Then something interesting happened...

In 1988, the first fiber optic cable between North America and Europe went into service. Fiber optics held the promise of bandwidth that was orders of magnitude greater than the copper wires previously laid in the Atlantic, and the new technology didn't disappoint: that first cable itself offered half of the entire bandwidth available on all of the communications satellites. Another cable would exceed the space capability, and that was just a start. Fiber optic cables were cheaper to deploy and had a much longer service life than any satellite, with corresponding reductions in the cost of moving data from one side of the earth to the other.

It didn't take long for the commercial satellite business to experience a serious drop in popularity; today, it's estimated that satellites carry less than a half-percent of all traffic between the U.S. and the rest of the world. Fiber optics were a hit, and it doesn't look like they'll stop being a hit anytime soon.

Thanks to all this fiber optic bandwidth we have the world wide web, which allows us to go back and relive how it all started: with insulated wires dropped off a ship into the middle of the sea. Here is a great site devoted to chronicling that early technology, complete with maps of historic cable routes.

-=[ Grant ]=-

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