"you might not think about your emails in quite the same way again" yes, i shall now always call them, sea-mails

I remember that cable laying gold rush. I was working for a ship repair yard in Seattle in the late 90s. The yard owned a Bering Sea crab fishing boat named the Auriga. She usually sat idle during most of the summer apart from the occasional small job they could find for her. When the cable laying bonanza hit we hired her out every summer to Pirelli to tend cable laying barges. So lucrative was the rush that it was cost effective to have the 160 foot ship and 100 foot barge picked up by a semi-submersible and hauled all the way around through the Panama canal to lay cable in the Atlantic. - My boss, the owner, long before that was the first person I heard the old businessman's adage that if there is ever a gold rush, you want to be the guy who sells shovels. He proved it with that boat.

"Laying cables might seem a bit old fashion" Me as somone who works for a Major Telecom company: "Oi, Wireless is even more old fashion. When ya think about it" Not to mention much more unreliable. Fibre cables are here to stay untill a better method is found out. You might say 5G mobile network. But this completely relies of Fiber cables between stations. In the end, its the cable that is the backbone of all telecommunication. The only thing I see a next step in telecom evolution is Quantum Entanglement. But that stuff is still quite some years to go.

There's nothing more satisfying than laying some cable.

16 hours to send a message? Dang, imagine the lag when playing multiplayer games.

nah, you don't reinvent the wheel, cable is probably going to last for a long time, just like non-flying-cars

"Relatively isolated places..." Shows Canada. OK technically accurate but still, ouch.

Small side note: the location breakage is determined by optical measuring technique called OTDR. Basically it tells you how long it takes for the light to travel to the nearest internal reflector (breakage), from which you can then calculate the distance.

The technical sequel to that one about telegraph lines!

"Pirates stole 11km worth of cable that linked Thailand, Vietnam, and Hong Kong." DAMN YOU INTERNET PIRATES!

2:50 The speed of light in a single mode fibre is about 70% of the speed of light in air (or free space). There are situations where it makes a difference and microwave links are used to link high-speed stock exchange traders in Chicago to reach NY stock exchange - because they can make money by being milliseconds quicker than the fibre route!

"Undersea cables aren't a subject that comes up in conversation very often." You clearly don't hang out with any engineers.

An optical fibre factory burned down near where I worked and one chap came to work with us . I asked him what was the longest unbroken strand of optical fibre they ever made . He said "From Norway to North America ". That took my breath away .

This pandemic has made me appreciate the internet so much more when I imagine it happening 20+ years back.

"And it ushered in a new age of friendship and cooperation"...giggle, "spoiler it did not." HAHAHAHAhahahh...silence...tears.

may the guardian angels protect these cables.

My favorite Gilligan's Island episode when I was a kid was the one in which one of these cables washed ashore during a bad night's storm and they tapped into it using vines and coconuts then proceeded to try and get someone to believe they were castaways on a deserted island and come rescue them... Gilligan fucked it all up, of course. GILLIGAN!

A program on starlink should be considered.

I find it fascinating that I click a button on my computer which trips a relay a continent away and Simon Whistler is on my screen a tenth of a second later,

Just think about how much of the fiberoptic cable traffic is just porn

nothing beats a physical connection!

So the next time Someone says they didn't get my email I can assume a shark ate it?

You, sir, have managed to explain how the Zimmerman Note was intercepted far better than any teacher that covered World War I-era American History.

I remember playing Doom with my dad on the other side of the Pacific over dial-up in 1995. Quite an impressive feat for the time, though the game ran at slide-show speeds

Suggestion, again: the construction of Disneyworld: From swamp land to land of magic and dreams.

"It's not just sharks with an electrical fetish that we have to worry about"

Brilliantly presented - thanks so much for sharing!

Last week, I watched some testing being performed on a subsea cable commissioned by my employer. I was in the UK and the testing, that I watched real time, was in China! I was able to watch video and verbally interact directly with the test engineers just as I would were I on site. Optical cables are now being added in straighter and more direct routes to shave milliseconds off the latency time to make financial trading more efficient. The additional trading profits more than pay for the manufacturing and installation. It’s a wonderful industry to get into if you are a young person looking for an engineering career sector to work in.

Simon's presentation and delivery is slick and engaging. Nice one!

Well done! I'm in the industry and you did a great job of explaining.

These channels keep getting better and better. Two topics on my PhD, first landslides and then undersea cables. Now I just need stuff on sonar.

One of the guys I work for is involved in faulting Undersea Fibres from land, using OTDR to give the repair vessel a location. Massive lasers and generators to provide emergency backup power. Pretty crazy stuff !

I remember the days when overseas phone calls went via satellite. The call quality was fine but the round-trip delay up to geostationary orbit and back sometimes made conversations awkward. In my work we use satellite data but there's no need for realtime response so one uplink in the back parking lot covers the entire country.

"Wireless" will never be as good as cables. Yes, it may be more convenient (for home use) or cheaper (satellites for far-away places), but cables will always be better Radio spectrum is limited - every transmitter is taking up some of it and will interfere with other transmitters on the same frequency. In comparison, you can have 100 fibers in a cable, each carrying 10 or more gigabits per second with no problem. Radio waves are also affected by the weather - rain and snow absorbs some of them etc. Sadly, some people consider cables "old-fashioned" just based on their own home/office needs.

Although informative I’m afraid this short documentary only scratched the surface of what actually goes on in the cable industry. I’ve been working in the industry for the last 30 years and have worked all over the world laying and repairing telecommunications cables, my job is to operate and maintain subsea equipment that buries the cable in the seabed. The equipment we use, one is called a plow which can weigh up to 34 tones, this is lowered from the stern of the vessel then its towed along the seabed with the cable running through it, the cable is stored in huge cable tanks onboard the vessel, the plow can bury the cable up to 3m into the seabed, this is done through Fishing grounds and shipping anchorage’s. The other bit of kit is a little smaller called a trencher, this is like a bulldozer size vehicle with tracks and has a high pressure water pump fitted and what are called jet legs that straddle the cable, when the water pump is fired up, the high pressure water blows a trench under the cable allowing it to fall into the trench, this is mainly used after a cable has been repaired and laid back on the seabed as shown in the film, this vehicle can also retrieve a broken damaged cable from the sea bed using what’s call a cut and grip method using two manipulators that are attached in front of the trencher. We operate the vehicles remotely from a control room that’s located on the ship deck. These two methods of burying the cable are used on the continental shelf only, once the cable is off the shelf the cables are too deep to bury so it’s called surface laying, There are several different thicknesses of cable depending where the cable is being laid on the seabed, Rock armour, double armour single armour and light weight armour. What also makes up the part of the cable systems are whats called repeaters these amplify the light source over long distances and are a part of the cable system . I could go on and on sorry! Oh! and we’ve never come across sharks damaging cable it’s just an urban myth....! 🤷🏻‍♂️

Good video. I was a telecommunications technician before I retired. I think fiber optic cable will be around awhile. With new technology they are using multiplexing different wavelengths of light into the same fiber pair. If you had 192Gb with a single wave length, now you can have over a dozen wavelengths on that same fiber pair. One problem with undersea fiber is regulating the repeater current when there is solar activity.

Off topic, but Alfa-Class Submarine, please!!!!

2:36 lol the voice crack and then the look around like, i guess we're still filming..

Another good one Simon thanks for the information

Fabulous vid Simon, quite happy to see this covered after the first cable video.

Do a megaproject on Harrier jump jet

Megaproject Suggestion. Longest deep bore ice core in Antarctica. Took years, loads of drama with it and they found some cool stuff like a fresh water lake under the ice containing previously unknown lifeforms. Would go Well with the other hole projects that are popular Speaking of deep holes, how about the Kidd Mine as well?

As always, great video, thank you

This is a megaproject that I've always wondered how was made. Thanks for this.

I wrote a paper about one of the original cables, the one put in by Lord Kelvin, in my "history of physics" course at uni. Interesting stuff.

2:00 - Chapter 1 - Cables & our lives 3:15 - Chapter 2 - The 1st cable 3:55 - Chapter 3 - The all red line 5:15 - Chapter 4 - WWI 6:30 - Chapter 5 - Cold war 8:00 - Chapter 6 - Fibre optic arrives 9:30 - Chapter 7 - Modern day 11:40 - Chapter 8 - Dangers to the cables 13:30 - Chapter 9 - What's next ?

One point that Simon glossed right over: He said that signals pass through the optical fibers at the speed of light. While that IS true, the speed of light IN FIBER is only about 2/3 the speed of light IN A VACUUM or through air. This fun fact feeds into the effort to build a new series of microwave communication links between New York and Chicago, following the straightest possible route, in order to get data back and forth as fast as possible. Note that it's only about 800 miles between New York and Chicago. At the speed of light in a vacuum, a message would need only about 4 milliseconds to make the trip. In fiber, it need 50% more, so 6 milliseconds. It's evidently worth millions of dollars to build a communication link to shave 2 milliseconds off the time for a message to make the trip.

Very happy to see you video SER THANK YOU VERY MUCH WISHING YOU PLESEND WEEKEND.

As I recall, part of what made the Soviet wire tapping so effective was the information going through it, had little to no encryption. The Soviet's just, didn't worry about that cable, so didn't bother.

I've thought about these things growing up as the internet and social media spread throughout the world. It's nuts to think of all the data sent through those connections and natural oceanic conditions.

Problems and breakages aren't just caused in the water itself, either. In the early-mid '90's, I was working for AT&T in their "Cable Hazard" or "Cable Protection" group (whichever title the speaker found "cooler" at the time. Just a few months after starting, I wound up being the one taking the call for a major breakage under the San Francisco Bay. The cause? A construction crew on the highway hadn't given the full range of the construction. The length of highway they had mentioned was listed as "Non Involved", ie., our cable was not in the area the crews would be digging. Unfortunately, the project actually ran much further... and further down, not only did AT&T have buried cable, but so did Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E). One of our local techs happened to be driving past the site and noticed a backhoe sitting oddly along the road. Knowing there was cable there, he pulled over to see what was going on - and promptly called us. I listened as he described how, near as he could tell, the blade of the backhoe had sliced into not only our fiber optic cable, but PG&E's electrical line as well. I say "near as he could tell" because most of what he could see in the growing darkness were sparks and pooled water from the rain. No way he was going down into that, and I can't blame him. I won't bore anyone with the process used to figure out how much cable was damaged, but in wound up being around 2500 feet - the majority of that at the bottom of the Bay. That might not sound like much, but when the cost of the cable is listed as "per inch"... ouch. And that's before the cost of re-installing the replacement.

Amazing video. Love this type of engineering detail

At last, I heard my country mentioned in beardo's Whistler's video, it was among the last to get the fiber optics technology. Greetings from Kenya!!

England: Greetings subjects of the crown, 16 hours later, America: hey, wat up

Excellent video, both thumbs up!

Thank you so much for this!! I've wondered about tjis since I was a kid!!

Simon - Just got to say that you appear to be the hardest sodding KZfaqr out there! I keep discovering channels you host! Keep up the good and hard work good sir

I was terminating a section of fiber between NY and London and was at the London office talking with my counterpart in NY. We were checking which connectors were attached at both ends just to verify everything was correct. It was pretty cool that we were firing lasers at each other across the Atlantic and getting instant results. The bad part of the job was having to collect OTDR results for all 512 pairs going in both directions. It was a nightmare.

Great video, I work in the industry and when we have a fault it is amazing to see how quickly (in relative terms) they fix the faults, Hibernia look after a lot of our connections and like calling out an Openreach Engineer (UK, ie AT&T in the US) to fix a fault, They call out a repair ship. When we get big events and big game releases (Call of Duty 250Gb) we can see upwards of 7TB/s of data crossing our network, Companies like google, MS. FB, Amazon do move a lot of data packets but the circuits are leased, The big players for optic fibre are people like Zayo, Centurylink. Even in the UK we are moving towards 1TB/s connections in the heart of our communication infrastructure. Just imagine if every household in the UK had a FTTP ( Fibre to the Premiss) connection with a min 300mb and they all started streaming a 4k film or used that full 300mb/sec, it would collapse the infrastructure. Just imagine the infrastructure as a skeleton. The fingers can be smaller but the Spine and Ribs need to be big ,This is where fibre is amazing, There is noting faster than light! In the future yes they may make faster hardware at each end but that little glass fibre in-between will last forever. Cough… as long as the glass quality can sustain higher rates of data without casuing errors due to manufacturing issues*

Lasers on each end keep getting better making a old line even faster

Where's the blaze, Simon?!! It's been four days.. I'm having withdrawals! This cocaine isn't gonna snort itself.

Video Recommendation: USS Nautilus SSN-571 The First Nuclear Submarine

Hi Simon - I love your stuff but two errors I noticed in your intro. First, I'm not sure who told you about the "99.7%" of the speed of light. Light travels at about 300,000 km/s in a vacuum (that's the speed we get taught in school and pub quizzes). But optical fiber is made of glass. The refractive index of glass is about 1.5 (give or take), so light actually travels through fibre at about 200,000 km/s. There are experiments to build fiber that has hollow cores (typically filled with an inert gas), so the optical signal would travel at very nearly 300,000 km/s (maybe that's where the 99.7% came from) but that may never happen in reality - lots of technical challenges that may just kill the idea - think of it like nuclear fusion in that it's always X years away. The second error is when you explain when we'd use fibre links or satellite. A subsea cable like MAREA cost about $300M and can potentially transmit about 200 Tb/s in total (each of the eight fibre pairs may be using different vendors' equipment so they will perform differently, but that's a roughly accurate number). The Starlink constellation has a cost of about $10 billion and a total capacity of about 24 Tb/s. So satellites are WAY MORE expensive and have WAY LESS capacity than fibre links. The reason you would use satellite is if fiber links are not practical (like in a cruise ship or airliner - remember those from before Covid?), or not available (like if you live in a cute Shropshire cottage, or if you're a farmer).

great vid as always!

Suggestion: The Erie Canal. It's even kind enough to have its own song, The Erie Canal Song, making it that much easier for your editor.

Gonna make sure my emails are waterproof from now on!

This episode was awesome just like all the others! I have a recommandation for a video, it’s the Allegheny steam locomotive, it was apparently only rivaled in strength by the Big Boy. Even today people still argue which locomotive was stronger.

No joke, I was actually wondering about this last week.

Next video on starlink?

Cables will always be there because they are immune to solar flairs. When the satellites all go out, we still got the cables.

Simon, your globes are freaking out flat earthers... Please continue...

Used to work for MCI Worldcon, UUnett and Cable, and Wireless. Working on TAT# and others. Amazing working one end and imagining just how far away the other engineer is. Had issues on one commissioning project and had a phone electrical taped to my head for 7 hours. Loved it! Still washing the Shmoo off me 25 odd years later!

So umm recommendations Exxon Valdez The Transocean event The keystone pipeline The cowboys stadium The Mercedes Benz stadium in Atlanta The tiger 2 tank

Nowadays the NSA doesnt need to send divers to the cables, they simply enforce all "friendly" countries to just let them have all the data, otherwise they may be considered an "enemy" and require "liberating".

I think this is your best video and comments in a while!

Great upload

Do they run underneath the oceans or in the oceans?

How about the grandma who accidentaly cut out the whole internet of Armenia 😂

This is such a strategic vulnerability and it’s stunning that we don’t have enough coverage to protect or defend this resource.

Yay!!...my request!!....Thank you Simon...

Two suggestions: Star Link Star Citizen

All this technology and yet residential internet in canada is getting worse.

Raising Chicago isn't a mega project but this is. This should be a side project too, bro. Fuck it, everything's a side project now. God damn it, Simon.

Awesome video!!

God has really blessed us with the knowledge and abilities to make things like this happen and work. Thanks again Simon.

I have fiber optic wired direct to my computer, even with the most high tech wireless card and router, (which ive tried) the difference in latency and data transmission speed is so shockingly apparent it is easily visible. Hard wiring just makes sense when you want high quality, and that gos for audio too millennials...LOL!!

Fun fact: circa 1895-1905 the circumference of the earth was measured by US Coast and Geodetic Survey. And that was by Telegraph to determine precise longitudes along the route.

3:00 Breaking up those monopolies is long overdue.

Simon,still waiting for you to do a video about the original world trade center that was destroyed on september 11th,2001

For 8 months I lived in an apartment in Penzance, Cornwall that used to be the building housing the first landing station for communication cables that were run from Britain to the U.S, South Africa and Australia...fascinating history with that building...

Thanks Simon. Just contributing to the undersea internet traffic!

I just installed an update today of a program I use to create floorplans; the program is cloud-based, and the company it belongs to is in Norway -- I live in Atlanta, GA. This is truly remarkable, by any standard or metric.

I'm sure that the cables we use will change but I'm not sure we'll ever get rid of them for Satellites or similar options. One of the most significant limiting factors in computing is the speed of light - we can't send data faster than this. Using satellites would increase the distance data needs to travel and mean that the time it takes for a message to travel would increase. It's why playing video games with people on the other side of the world is not a great experience - this isn't because of any issues with the communication infrastructure, that data just takes a long time to travel. Solutions that increase that delay would only make those experiences worse.

Yeah big ups to this man on the vidya!

Great upload.

Thank you

I love that you said China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong separately, because that is correct.

Couple things are off but always entertaining.

The undersea cable maps are pretty cool and mindboggling (just google "undersea cable map" and you'll get a bunch of results). I'd like to see a good video of how the cables are repaired (I get the splicing and pulling up, I meant actually repairing the fiber optics) but only found general animations. I did read that some companies are starting to bury their undersea cables to protect them better.

I could tell you some more about the fiber optic cables in the ocean since I turned up PTAT1 back in 1989. That cable tripled the capacity across the Atlantic and the cost was $550 Million. (tom Meserole)