A Neal Stephenson long read about undersea cables. So good!
I've added this book to my list, and it looks like a short read.
Thanks. Hope I like it.
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.
In 2026 this is a surprisingly non-pearl clutching take on British influence abroad.
Two notes of interest, it only covers "British influence abroad" at one specific location for a relatively short interval of time, and it neatly avoids looking too deeply into a classic of British colonialism; the divide and conquer approach of strategically favouring some over others to push any resulting unrest at arms length away from the actual British.
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.
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.
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.
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...
(This is a really meandering article!)