FRIDAY SURPRISE: How do you fix an undersea cable?

Friday, May 04, 2007 Filed in: Friday Surprise!, Technology, Completely irrelevant
That's right - an undersea cable. I'll bet you thought that undersea cables were a thing of the past, right? You probably had it in your mind that satellite technology had rendered the undersea cable a relic of a bygone age, didn't you? As Gomer would say, "surprise, surprise, surprise!"

The vast majority of telephone and internet traffic flows on undersea cables, to this day. Compared to satellites, cables are cheaper and have much greater bandwidth. As a result, there are hundreds of cables in use today, and well over 1,000 cable landing sites (where the cables come ashore) around the world. Here's a good graphic of the undersea cables - and their load - in use today. Wikipedia has a good article on cables, with lots of links to other sites that can tell you everything you ever wanted to know about the subject!

Of course, all those cables sitting on the ocean floor are subject to lots of forces, and sooner or later they break. So, how do you repair a cable that might be thousands of feet deep, well below the ability to use human divers?

Find out here.

-=[ Grant ]=-
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