Say goodbye to the undersea cable that made the global Internet possible

Sharks are innocent. Or at least they don’t eat the Internet. As a family of cartilaginous fish, sharks are innocent of most, if not all, charges of biting, biting, chewing or otherwise attacking an underwater network of fiber optic cables. The people who build and maintain the nearly 600 undersea cables that carry almost all of our intercontinental traffic – supporting almost every swipe, tap, zoom and scroll of doom anywhere in the world – have a love-hate relationship with this myth that has persisted for decades. They may even hate that I’m starting this article with this.

If a cable is suspended above the seabed, the shark may pinch it while exploring. Sometimes they will attack a cable being pulled out of the water. But for the shark to actually bite the cable, you’d have to wrap the fish around it, like you’d hide a pill in a piece of cheese for a dog. Rats can be a hazard on land because their incisors never stop growing, so they like to pin them down on semi-soft cables. But no one ever asks about rats, maybe because, as my friend pointed out, “Sharks make you cool, but rats make it sound like you have a problem.”

Sometimes people ask about satellites, and especially in Sweden (where I live) about alleged sabotage in the Baltic Sea. Historically, however, shark bites have attracted the most attention. The myth began almost 40 years ago with the development of an undersea fiber-optic cable known as TAT-8. TAT-8 practically invented the concept of internet cable and now that it is ready for retirement, I have spent time with the offshore workers, crew members and engineers who are in the process of pulling it from the seabed. This is the real story of undersea cables – not sabotage or sharks, but the people who take care of the physical components that keep all our digital communications running smoothly.

Fiber optic transmission is available an almost magical way of transferring information using airy pulses. Most people don’t even think about how quickly we’ve come to accept instant communication as normal, even those of us who remember when we had to book international phone calls in advance. The more people I meet in this industry, in this web of people and things, the more offensive it is that “we” only notice it when it breaks. (Who is this “we”, I always want to know?) Billions of people can walk around without noticing this infrastructure, thanks to the daily work of several thousand people, sometimes at sea, other times buried under piles of permits, studies and orders for thousands of kilometers of cables that will connect to the millions of kilometers of cables on the seabed that will ensure that our planet is constantly surrounded by airy.

I also need to correct something else. Most people call them “internet cable,” but technically, fiber optic transmission was developed for telephone calls. One of the people involved was the English scientist Alec Reeves, who also worked on psychokinesis and telepathy. Thanks to optical fiber, the voices become airy, pulsate in glass strings as slender as a spider’s web and become voices again in the receiver on the other end. Maybe there isn’t that substantial of a conceptual leap between that and moving things with your mind.

TAT stands for Trans-Atlantic Telephone, and TAT-8—built by AT&T, British Telecom, and France Telecom—was the eighth transoceanic system across the Atlantic. It was the first to exploit optical fiber to transmit traffic between Europe and the United States. Fiber optics for communications were not developed in theory until the 1960s, and terrestrial cables were first used in the 1970s. However, the exploit of this technology to encompass continents was virtually equivalent to human galactic expansion.

When TAT-8 entered service on December 14, 1988, science fiction writer Isaac Asimov spoke via video link from Recent York to audiences in Paris and London: “Welcome everyone to this historic transatlantic crossing,” he said, “to this maiden voyage across the sea in a ray of light.” AT&T ran a television ad in which a sedate voiceover promised the creation of a “worldwide intelligent network” in which people could send information in any format to whomever they wanted. Recall the montage of telephone operators: “This is AT&T. Have you booked a call to Poland?” “I have a call to Russia.” “What city in Cuba are you calling?” If they wanted to inspire viewers, it was not with the promise of the Internet, which was still too niche for most of us to understand, but with the end of the Cool War.