A Neal Stephenson long read about undersea cables. So good!
The new and novel thing in 1996 from the author's perspective is cables being built not by a PTT type "telephone company" (the Bell System/AT&T, BT, France Telecom, etc) but a new entity that intended to build the cables to sell capacity to multiple telcos.
I've added this book to my list, and it looks like a short read.
Thanks. Hope I like it.
In 2026 this is a surprisingly non-pearl clutching take on British influence abroad.
For anyone who wants to know more about the early history of undersea cables, I also enjoyed ‘A Thread Across the Ocean’ by John Steele Gordon.
Does it mean that there's a ton of repeaters under the sea? Where do they get the power from?
the extra interesting part i think is how they amplify the signal without having to decode it, just optically
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_communications_cable...
That left me wondering now, how would that even work? The wiretapping, that is
Has a good story of how it was done several decades ago. Not sure how it works these days.
Even if it's not automated, the number of cores in multicore fibers tends to be pretty low, and there's a standard for marking fibers [1], that's similar-ish to the standard for marking copper pairs [2].
If anyone is curious as to why it took so long: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telegraph_cable
TLDR: "smearing" of the signal (capacitance), no underwater amplifiers, very faint signal at the end.
(This is a really meandering article!)
