Undersea Communication Cables

hello everybody welcome back to a brand new episode of mega projects this one is all about undersea communication cables those are big cables that run underneath the oceans transferring data everywhere we're going to learn all about them indeed at some point the data for this video has probably traveled on one of these to your location so let's jump in [Music] as you might already know water covers 71 percent of the earth's surface the distances across our oceans are pretty vast to put it mildly cornwall at the southwestern edge of britain to new york city is roughly 5 278 kilometers a journey from japan in the far east to california in the far west across the international date line is a mammoth 8884 kilometers these are distances that until fairly recently used to take people months to travel now with modern communication technology it's done in the blink of an eye however some things that many might not be aware of is that much of our information still travels across our oceans or should we say across the ocean floor undersea communication cables is one topic that rarely seems to come up in conversation but what if i told you that below the choppy waters of our oceans seas and lakes lie an extraordinary 1.2 million kilometers that's 745 000 ish miles worth of communication cables lie if you're having difficulty putting that kind of number into context that's roughly three times the distance from the earth to the moon in our modern digital world you might be excused for thinking that the digital information somehow magically electronically shoots from our computer and arrives at the recipient computer thousands of miles away but this is not the case in fact 99 of international communication uses fiber optic cables most of which lie underwater [Music] before we get into the history surrounding the undersea cables we'll start with a little more information about the current cables that link our world modern cables are normally 25 millimeters in diameter and weigh roughly 1.4 tons per kilometer if you look at a submarine cable map you'll see that they go absolutely everywhere relatively isolated places might only have one cable running to it but other areas like the west of europe and the eastern united states are linked with 5 10 and even more cable lines as i've already mentioned almost all of our communication travels through these cables from telephone calls to internet connections if you're beginning to think that this sounds a little old-fashioned with thousands of satellites currently orbiting the earth it comes down to cost and speed information traveling along the undersea cables is traveling at roughly 99.7 percent the speed of light and while the initial expense of lane the cables can be high in the long run it is significantly cheaper than using satellites as of 2018 about half of the cables around the world were owned or leased by google facebook amazon and microsoft with the rest owned by various telecommunication companies or consortiums [Music] now we're only going to cover the first cable very briefly not because it wasn't an extraordinary achievement with a great story but because it's a story that we've already fully covered on mega projects in a dedicated separate video watch that after this one if you fancy it the first transatlantic communication cables were laid in 1858 after years and years of difficulty all of which we addressed in that other video for the first time in history two people on different continents were able to communicate the first of which were queen victoria and u.s president james buchanan although the rate of speed was agonizingly slow and took 16 hours just to deliver a short message the last few decades of the 19th century and into the 20th century saw a boom in undersea communication cables as the preeminent global power at the time it was britain who led the way and the british empire was linked by the all red line which circumnavigated the globe without needing to land anywhere that wasn't under the direct control of the british crown the british empire was really big this line effectively linked britain with barbados south africa india australia and new zealand and finally back to canada before heading back across the atlantic to britain while it would be wrong to suggest that the laying of any of these cables was easy by far the most challenging and daunting was the cable that crossed half of the pacific ocean from fanning islands to british columbia in canada this was the final section of the all-red line which was officially completed in 1911 for 2 million which works out at 237 million today elsewhere hawaii was linked to the mainland united states in 1902 while guam and the philippines were linked the next year at this point every continent on the planet was now linked by undersea cables except for antarctica surely this newfound connectivity would herald in a glorious era of friendship and cooperation spoiler alert it didn't [Music] or not no sooner had britain declared war on germany in response to its declaration of war on france the british government ordered the immediate sabotage of all german communication lines on the 5th of april 1914 a ship named the alert slipped quietly out of dover before proceeding to an area of the english channel it was here that their captain ordered hooks to be lowered in the dredging of the seabed to begin after just a few hours all five of germany's undersea cables had been severed and their private connections to the world were gone i say private because they could still use the british communication lines which is well exactly what britain hoped they would do the uk sent 400 sensors to its distant outposts along with 180 that remained in britain to monitor communication traffic moving along the communication lines throughout the entire war as many as 18 million messages were subjected to some kind of censorship perhaps the most tantalizing piece of information to be intercepted was the so-called zimmerman telegram in which germany offered mexico u.s land in exchange for military alliance unsurprisingly the british government gleefully revealed the telegram to the u.s administration an act that no doubt sped up american involvement in world war one but this was still small fry compared to what the americans pulled off during the cold war if you've been following along with mega projects you may have seen our video on project azorian which the u.s attempted to salvage a soviet submarine from the pacific floor it didn't exactly work but it showed that the americans were willing to go to extreme measures to gain the upper hand during the cold war operation iv bell was another high-stakes gamble but this one they did pull off in the early 1970s the us government discovered the existence of an undersea cable linking vladivostok on the far east coast of the soviet union with a soviet pacific fleet naval base at petropavlovsk on the kamchatka peninsula further north to most of us the idea of sending a submarine and divers down to the frigid depths of the pacific to try and wiretap the soviets might sound rather absurd but this was the cold war and absurd as sort of the name of the game in october 1971 uss halibut traveled to the area under the guise of attempting to retrieve parts of a soviet cruise missile this part was actually true but while they were there they were also going to send divers down to the soviet cable and wrap a listening device around it each month divers would then return to the listening device to retrieve the tapes which were then sent on to the nsa astonishingly this went on for about 10 years until a disgruntled veteran of the nsa robert pelton who was knee-deep in debt began passing information onto the soviet union the americans had been rumbled and the recording device was finally removed and would eventually appear at the great patriotic war museum in moscow fiber optic cables arrived in the 1980s and it spawned an entirely new generation of undersea cables fiber optic cable is essentially a flexible fiber made out of either drawing glass or plastic which is normally only slightly thicker than a human hair the first cable to use such technology was the tate transatlantic communication cable which connected the united states with britain and france for 335 million dollars which is about 736 million dollars today and the work was completed in 1988 the tate line included two working pairs of fibers and one backup pair that was capable of carrying 280 megabits a second that's 40 000 telephone circuits across the ocean though there were a few hiccups due to manufacturing defects which meant the first two years were not quite smooth sailing as had been hoped by and large it was a great success so much so that it reached its operating capacity within 18 months which was considerably less than the decade that had been expected but this was almost certainly because of what had appeared on the horizon that would forever change our world the success of the tat-8 encouraged ibm to construct a dedicated transmission system between cornell university in new york state and the european organization for nuclear research cern in switzerland which was completed in february 1990. with this in place a high-speed constant connection was made between the early us and european versions of the internet ten months later we had our first demonstration of the world wide web and this brings us more or less to the modern day the introduction of fiber optic cable set off a mad dash as similar cables began appearing all over the world between 1999 and 2001 alone the cable industry spent roughly 22 billion dollars and the same period saw the balance of where cables had mostly been laid up to that point begin to shift considering how important trade between europe and the u.s had traditionally been it's no surprise that the majority of new cables ran across the atlantic ocean but between 1998 and 2003 70 percent of new cables being installed ran across the pacific ocean as the u.s began to pivot in that direction it wasn't until 2009 that east africa was finally plugged into the chain with an underwater cable that ran from mitsozini in south africa to marseille in france with landing ports in djibouti kenya tanzania and mozambique as well as an extension east to india the total cost of the line was believed to be in the region of 650 million dollars at this point you might be wondering just how all of this cable is laid once a decision is made to lay a cable a scouting ship will first map out a route ideally they want the cable to run along flat parts of the ocean while avoiding coral reefs shipwrecks and anything else that might snag a cable after the scouting run has been completed a specially designed boat called a cable layer can begin from a landing station this is the point where the cable is connected on land and will normally continue out into the ocean where it is spliced with the cable on the ship these boats can carry up to 2 000 kilometers worth of cable and once they're out to sea they can cover quite a distance per day anywhere between 100 and 200 kilometers after reaching their destination the cable can be spliced with a cable at another landing station and just like that you have an undersea communication cable while the fiber optics themselves are very small they are wrapped in several layers that bring the thickness up to the diameter of about a garden hose the optical fibers in the center are followed by layers of petroleum jelly a copper or aluminium tube polycarbonate an aluminium water barrier stranded steel wires mylar tape used in everything from nail polish to kites by the way and finally polyethylene [Music] now again a new story pops up telling how a certain area of the world has experienced a decrease in internet speed or even an outage because of a problem with these cables and these are actually more common than you'd think there are more than 50 repairs in the atlantic ocean alone per year we don't often notice because most countries are now linked by multiple cables so even if one goes down it doesn't significantly affect service these are quite delicate cables traveling thousands of miles and a lot can happen in that distance as we've already seen sometimes it is down to a rival foreign power though it must be said this is incredibly rare today sharks have also been known to take a liking to undersea cables possibly because they are attracted to the electrical current and sometimes gnaw straight through the cable earthquakes can also have a huge impact like with the 2006 hengchung earthquakes which rocked the south china sea on the 26th of december 2006. while luckily only two people died because of the earthquake itself the resulting internet outage was severe and affected china the philippines taiwan and hong kong but it's not just sharks with an electrical fetish and natural disasters that we need to worry about in march 2007 pirates stole 11 kilometers worth of cable that linked thailand vietnam and hong kong it resulted in internet users in vietnam experiencing much slower internet speeds than normal by the way the thieves tried to sell the 100 tons of cable for scrap but were apprehended by the police often cable breakages remain a mystery but still they need repairing the operators of the cables can normally detect where a breakage is because of electrical measurement the cable repair ship is then dispatched to the area and using hooks not much has changed in the last hundred years the crew fishes the cable out of the water most damage cables are repaired by adding a spliced section to both ends which creates a slightly longer cable than before so the additional length is left in a u-shape on the ocean floor i'd be willing to bet that in 100 or 200 years people might look back and laugh at us physically laying cables from consonants consonants even now it just sounds a little bit old-fashioned but that's just where we are with communication these days once you get past the slightly odd notion of 1.2 million kilometers of cables linking the world you can only marvel at this quite astonishing feat that we humans have managed to achieve looking at an undersea cable map it is simply astonishing just how many lines there are but when you consider the level of speed and connectivity we've come to expect you begin to understand why it's all needed but where do we go from here in 2013 internet traffic per capita was 5 gigabytes our need for speed and our rate of consumption of data online is growing exponentially but surely there will come a point where we can't just throw any more underseat cables around the ocean our undersea communication cable network is something few pay any attention to we give very little thought to how exactly you can send an email from britain to patagonia or alaska to zanzibar in a matter of seconds our thoughts on the matter tend to stop a fraction of a second after we hit send and we quickly move on but perhaps we should stop and consider this for a moment that our immediate connectivity is actually thanks to hundreds of thousands of miles of cable that stretch around our world the world indeed feels a lot smaller now because of the ease in which we can communicate but physical distances haven't changed those many miles still needed to be painstakingly laid and carefully maintained to put things in perspective the next time you send an email across an ocean picture that email traveling thousands of miles at close to a billion kilometers an hour below the surface of the ocean you might not think about your emails in quite the same way again so i really hope you found that video interesting if you did please do hit that thumbs up button below don't forget to subscribe if you've got a suggestion for a future mega projects video leave it in the comments below and as always thank you for watching [Music] you

Channel: Megaprojects

Views: 361,681

Rating: 4.9564972 out of 5

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Id: T96P2d2UVsQ

Length: 15min 35sec (935 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 18 2020