Terms like “the cloud” and “WiFi” can make it seem like the Internet exists in the air, without wires. But that’s not true. Almost all of our online world moves around the planet not across the sky or through space, but by way of a massive complex of cables crisscrossing the globe. And those cables are based on fiber optics.
Fiber optic technology turns information into pulses of light which are sent down long, hair-thin glass fibers, and then turned back into information on the other side. Today, fiber optic cables are the infrastructural backbone of the global internet. Countless fiber optic cables are in use around the world right now. Some of those lines are on land.
But there are also 1.5 million kilometers of fiber optics cables stretched across the bottom of entire oceans.
“About 95% or so of intercontinental traffic goes via submarine telecommunications cables,” says Jane Ruffino, a researcher studying global subsea cables. “No matter how wireless your device is and no matter how wireless you think your connection is, there is always a wire somewhere.”
Nearly all of the data moving around the planet this second is traveling across the bottom of an ocean somewhere.
And all of those submarine fiber optic lines in use today—about a million miles worth—all owe their existence to a single cable that started it all.
It’s known as the “Transatlantic Telephone Fiber Optic Submarine Cable 8.” TAT-8, for short. It was the first ever fiber optic cable to cross an ocean, and it really proved what fiber was capable of. It was a huge part of a telecommunications revolution, paving the way for the Internet that we have today.
TAT-8’s long journey began in the mid 19th century, when people first started experimenting with fiber optic technology, but not for communications. “It was essentially like a Victorian party trick,” Ruffino says. The glass fibers were used to light up gardens and dazzle guests. “They sort of had this technology and they weren’t quite sure what to do with it.”
Into the late 19th century, physicians began working fiber optics, using illuminated glass to light up bodies during surgery.
But by the second half of the 20th century, engineers began to see the potential of fiber optics and telecommunications.
And in the mid to late 70s, the first fiber optic telephone lines went up.
Before then, phone cables were copper-based. That was a problem when it came to the long distance submarine cables connecting continents across vast distances. Those copper cables couldn’t carry a lot of calls before the lines would start to sound static-y, or they became too busy for more phone traffic.
By contrast, a fiber optic line could theoretically carry way more calls, more quickly, and with way less static. And so very gradually, these old copper cables were getting replaced with the new fiber optics technology.
And not just phone lines, AT&T did the first ever live fiber optics TV transmission when it broadcast the Winter Olympics in 1980 from Lake Placid. And then they made this little promo film to brag about it.
But while the new technology was impressive, there were also big limitations. Fiber optic lines were still only available in a few places, and for relatively short distances. And all of it is terrestrial.
At the same time, satellites were threatening to squash fiber optics technology before it really even took off. “As soon as satellite technology developed, as soon as they started to put satellites for communication in space,” says Ruffino, “a lot of these cable and telephone companies said, ‘we’re cooked. Everything’s gonna be satellites. These are the last cables. We’re gonna go straight from telegraph cables to obsolescence.’”
At the time, satellite technology was becoming more and more popular. There were already some communications satellites in use. When it came to global telecommunications, the assumption was that satellites were the future and that they would be the thing that fully replaced those old copper cables.
The rising popularity of telecom satellites in the 1970s was partly because of the larger cultural obsession with space. Beaming phone calls to and from a satellite, hovering above the Earth—that felt way more exciting and futuristic than using wires.
“Satellites were a genuine competitor because they could carry voice traffic a lot more cheaply because cables are incredibly expensive to build,” Ruffino says. Satellite telecommunication was also simpler on a diplomatic level, because the U.S. could build and operate its own equipment, which the government preferred. “These cables that go between countries had to be built with consortia. So companies from different countries had to collaborate with each other. And with a satellite, an American company could just do it.”
In fact, the Federal Communications Commission, which gave permission for things like running new phone cables, was very pro-satellite. The FCC did not think that any cable-based telecom was worth it, especially compared to the newer, space-age technology. Ruffino says they drew a hard line with U.S. telecom on this. “The FCC said, ‘you know what, if you can’t find some way to compete on capacity and price, we’re not going to approve any more cables.’”
So despite all of its promise, it wasn’t a given that fiber optics would be the future for big long distance telecommunications.
But fiber did have one very big champion: AT&T. They were at the front of this fiber optics evolution. They were America’s giant telecom monopoly. Which is why in the 1970s the federal government began to break AT&T up.
As AT&T’s dissolution loomed, one way for the communications giant to keep and even extend its control of U.S. long distance communication was fiber optics cables. AT&T had been laying long distance cable for more than a hundred years. AT&T had all the expertise and equipment to lay cables all over the world. They wanted to keep the world running on cables because AT&T already controlled a lot of US telecom cables, including the undersea wires that were running from the US out into the world.
But they had to get the approval of the FCC, which told AT&T if it was going to lay more long distance cables, they had to build something that was better than satellites.
And AT&T’s Hail Mary would be TAT-8.
They teamed up with telecom companies in the UK and in France. And they formed this consortium. Together, they developed a plan to build a massive submarine fiber optic cable, and run it from the East Coast of the US, all the way over to western Europe. This would be the first fiber cable to ever cross a whole ocean.
In the early 1980s, they began doing stress tests around the world, dropping simulation cables into the North Atlantic to see how pressure change and temperature affected signal transmission, and if laying and recovering the cable caused any breaks in the fiber.
At the Bell Labs’ complex in Holmdel, New Jersey—where Severance is filmed—they also built the Ocean Simulation Facility to see if deep sea conditions disrupt the cable’s ability to transmit light across all that distance.
During one of their tests, they discovered breaks in the cable electrical signal. According to Ruffino, one of the lead researchers at Bell Labs had the shark teeth that’d been pulled from the glitchy cable.
There are competing versions of this story, but Jane Ruffino says the faults in the cables were probably abrasions from the seafloor. Nevertheless, out of an abundance of caution, engineers added extra layers of protection and insulation to the cable.
In 1986, AT&T began laying the cable across the floor of the Atlantic, from England and France across to Tuckerton, New Jersey, not far from Atlantic City.
In December 1988, they finally switched on the “Transatlantic Telephone Fiber Optic Submarine Cable 8,” the massive, first of its kind, state-of-the-art cable.
It was immediately clear that TAT-8 was a revolution in global telecommunications. First, because it was a quantum leap in capacity. TAT-8 could carry 40,000 phone calls at once—10 times the capacity of its predecessor, which was a copper-based cable.
The superiority of subsea fiber optics to satellites was plain to see. Satellites had a problem with latency, where the time it took for a signal to go up to space and back caused delays. And the quality of that signal quality was mediocre compared to the fiber cables of TAT-8.
Also, TAT-8 proved that submarine fiber cables could actually be cheaper to make, install, and repair.
Perhaps best of all, TAT-8 was coming into use just as the World Wide Web was taking off. So it was also perfectly positioned to fill the immediate demand for infrastructure that could move huge amounts of information all over the world quickly.
Once TAT-8 proved the concept of international submarine lines, the FCC invested more and more in fiber optics cables. By the 1990s, the capacity of fiber optics overtook satellites and it just kept growing. Today we are completely reliant on fiber optic technology, with more than 600 sprawling subsea cables enmeshing the planet right now.
Although cables like TAT-8 were developed by international telecom consortia, today half of all the bandwidth across the world’s subsea cables is controlled by giant tech corporations—Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon.
The expansion of AI has sparked a subsea cable boom. All of those tech giants need wires that connect all those data centers around the world. And they’re investing more and more in subsea cables.
As for TAT-8: even though it revolutionized global telecom and played a decisive role in the birth of the Internet, it won’t be part of the AI explosion.
That’s because TAT-8 didn’t actually work for all that long. It was switched on in 1988, and it stopped working in 2002—just 14 years later. It’s been sitting at the bottom of the Atlantic for almost 40 years.
Now, crews have started recovering TAT-8. Partly because there are limited routes where subsea cables can run, and demand for that space is surging. TAT-8 is made of some valuable components like copper, which is getting stripped and recycled.
The steel in TAT-8 is being turned into fencing. And the plastic is being recycled into consumer goods. “So when next time you’re washing your hair,” Jane Ruffino says, “you can imagine that you could be squeezing your shampoo from part of what used to be the first fiber optic transatlantic cable.”
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