"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.
Here in Australia when they started building our fibre to the home broadband network idiots would say “why bother with fibre when wireless will replace it”. Fibre optic cables will never be obsolete and we are always finding new ways to shove more information down those same fibre optic cable that were layed years ago. Wireless can’t ever hope to carry the same bandwidth as fibre or carry it over the same kinds of distances. The amount of radio spectrum available is limited as well whereas there is no spectrum limit to fibre optic cables, you can just continue laying more cables add infinitum and they never interfere with each other, unlike radio spectrum.
I co-run a internet and communications company too , and this comment is spot on , fiber is the way that a lot of people get connection, or if not fiber , point to point connection is pretty common too , at least in my area.
I’m a splicer in the Midwest and the fiber backbone is supposedly going to be in place by 2023 but I think 2025 is more likely judging by my last 20 years of experience in roll outs of projects
@@David-lr2vi that's the best part about optical fiber (and specifically, single mode optical fiber) your fiber that's carrying 1 Gbps today can be upgraded to 100 Gbps by just swapping the transceivers at each end--no need to replace the fiber itself. And even with the ultra-dense multiterrabit speeds of today's backbone networks, we're no where close to fiber's theoretical maximum bandwidth.
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!
What he said. I think even 70% is high. It’s closer to (a little over) half. This is the whole selling point of Starlink. The faster signal in a vacuum means they can shave more than a couple ms off.
68.1% (1/1.467 give or take) And then there's this: www.extremetech.com/computing/151498-researchers-create-fiber-network-that-operates-at-99-7-speed-of-light-smashes-speed-and-latency-records
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
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 !
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....! 🤷🏻♂️
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.
considering how little was done to the swamp itself... meh, its just like a basic housing complex super sized+some utility tunnels and more screaming children and rats(big and small)
@@mistbooster I'm sure I sound bitter, but 6 rides in a whole day because the lines are so long? Then lunch. Outback Steakhouse prices for food that would allegedly embarass a McDonalds employee.
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).
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.
I remember watching TV, usually live newscasts, where the sound and video would be sent y different methods. . . some cable, some satellite (I’m inferring), resulting in noticeable synchronization problems between sound and picture. Even now, sometimes when I’m watching a bicycle race from Europe on the internet, I’ve seen discrepancies ad much as 15 seconds, but that must be due to something else entirely.
This is exactly why satellite tv and radio work excellently, but satellite internet is terrible. On the other hand Starlink's LEO satellites are a different story. People think of space as really far away, but most people on earth are closer to space than they are to an ocean... 100km or 62 miles. So Low Earth Orbit satellites can be very quick both ways, but they are still limited in bandwidth compared to a wire. what-if.xkcd.com/58/
I remember those overseas calls with the delay. There would always be a few moments of awkwardness when talking over the person you were speaking to. Much quicker now.
10:30 These scouting ships also have to assess the makeup of the seabed to make sure that the cable will either bury itself or can be buried by a high pressure water jet from a deep water trenching machine out to a certain depth to keep the cables protected from anchors, nets, marine life, etc. 11:15 There are also amplifiers every ~70km. These require power, which is provided to them in the areas around the core. (That size isn't just for "bigger is better".) That power comes from on-shore power plants (both ends). Yes. It's like one of those overhead electric lines spanning the ocean floor and runs at up to 20kv. Given the distances involved, you have to do that if you want the power to reach all the way through without burning up the cable.
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 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.
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!
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.
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*
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.
@@psychiatry-is-eugenics They are pretty cool instruments. We had a fibre problem between locations, the link was 2.4km. I blasted the OTDR on the link and a big attenuation showed up 622m from the test point. Got the papers to go and check it out and found the issue in the exact place the plans indicated. Bad splice in an underground conduit. OTDR is an amazing tool.
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.
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)
The performance for telephone communication is much better with cable. 40-50 years ago there was an annoying delay when talking to a person on another continent because of the time it took for radio signals to travel to and from satellites. Now with fiber optics, the delay is hardly noticeable.
As a person who used to design fiber optic computer networks, it is hilarious to watch someone without a technical background try to relate technical information.
Simon - Just got to say that you appear to be the hardest sodding RUclipsr out there! I keep discovering channels you host! Keep up the good and hard work good sir
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.
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...
Need another project. You should cover the automation and technology that allows the major suppliers of the auto industry to deliver huge volume. Most machining suppliers have invested in robotics and automation that allows them to increase volume by a large margin.
@3:36 Buchanan received this communication at a resort hotel in my tiny hometown in Pennsylvania. He was otherwise considered a pretty terrible president.
You should have mentioned Global Crossings which went bankrupt laying most of the fiber optic cable layed in the 1990's. Their work laid the foundation of our modern international fiber optic cabled network.
@@danielduncan6806 Oh wow! The person who gets to determine what does and doesn't qualify is here! Mind if I ask what you were thinking on the 5 years soviet plans?
There's a good reason for submarine cables being proffered over satellite links for some financial transactions. Speed. Satellite links may involve up and down hops. In the days before low earth orbit satellite constellations the time delay was enough for submarine to be just at bit (!) quicker. Time is money when buying or selling shares - get your order in first and make moe profit before your order changed the price.
The thing with satellites is that the vast majority of the available tech we have, that has the required range, is really crap at bidirectional communication. This is something most people who have ever used satellite internet connectivity can surely attest to, at least anecdotally. So in most such scenarios, we usually don't actually do bidirectional through satellite, only incoming to the end user, and then use land lines or cellular networks for outgoig data. And if we were to try to overcome this with using traditional copper and fiber domestically, and then aggregate that at a few central points with more capable satellite tech, say bonce radio signal off one or more satellites for signal between the UK and US... Then we very quickly hit a rock wall of bandwidth. Some may think that the relatively high bandwidth range of radio waves should be able to accommodate huge amounts of bandwidth. And in a sense that's certainly true, but that also severely underestimate how much bandwidth we consume. The limits of RF is simply wholly inadequate for our needs. As of today, only light can accommodate the extreme frequencies we need,to pack enough data within the medium's available frequency band.
Another thing many people tend to forget about our modern communication society is how much energy all that stuff consumes. And to be failr laying a cable on the ocean floor might sound difficult and expensive but if you look at the map it becomes obvious that laying cables on land is even more difficult/expensive.
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!!
I work for one of the biggest fiber connection operators in the world, and we still get customers complain that they're getting 250ms+ of latency in connecting between India and California. It is SO annoying dealing with people who understand nothing about physics.
Maybe a follow-9n piece on how we've been continually finding new ways to pump more and more data through the danged things? Light communications is finally catching up to RF - instead of on/off keying (worked up to 10G), we're finally using complex analog waveforms to give us 100G, and in some places 400G. Also, using orthogonal polarizations of light to double data rates (per "color"), and using as much as 128 "colors" of light on a single fiber. All, of course, because it's cheaper to upgrade the LTE than it is to lay new cables
Surely the use of cables makes sense, not only from a cost point of view, but also given the ever present risk of a large Carrington event-style CME that could easily turn satellites into orbiting piles of rare metal scrap?
That was amazing, just out of curiosity what do they do with no longer used cables ?, there must be hundreds of thousands of tons of copper & other reusable materials down there, please tell me they don't just leave it there ?.
I don't think I saw any mention of the need for undersea repeaters, to boost the signal. I think these are spaced about 20km apart and are usually powered by kilovolts worth of power. If you really want to go deep, you could mention the use of erbium doped amplifiers - the benefit of these is that the optical signal can remain optical and doesn't need to be converted back to an electrical signal, boosted then converted back again to an optical signal. I think I'm right in saying that it's the use of the kilovolts worth of power (or the electric field from it) that attracts the sharks.
Simon, i think perhaps you should do something along the lines of evolution of the motor vehicle, as so many believe that Ford is the like the first car when in fact Ford was just the first to mass produce on a assembly line, but it was Europe that came up with the first car....
Hi Simon, I'm once again asking you to cover Denver International Airport. It's the second largest airport in the world, fifth busiest in the USA, and one of the top 25 busiest in the world. In true mega projects fashion, it went over budget, took too long to build, and has a host of conspiracy theories around it. I think you'd enjoy covering it, and I'd love to see a hometown landmark shown on this channel!
I remember our company's WAN being affected when the Sea-We-Me-3 cable was damaged off India's West coast by a shipwreck that sank directly onto the cable in a storm
Just a friendly note that the statement that the speed of information transfer in the cable at 2:47 that it travels at 99.7% of the speed of light is incorrect. The information transfer is about 2/3 of the speed of light in the cable, give or take some based on whether its fiber-optic or wire. In space, the information can transfer between satellites at near the speed of light, thus meaning lower theoretical latency. It is likely that you mixed up these two figures. I would argue that the main reason that we use undersea cables rather than satellites is that, historically speaking, the cost of bandwidth for these kinds of satellites was absolutely unacceptable in comparison. It is possible that years from now we will be using LEO satellites instead, but the technology to make the antenna to talk to such satellites was not as readily available outside of military applications until more recently, and it wasn't even a consideration many decades ago.
How about a megaproject video on launching satellites into space. I worked for Lockheed Martin’s satellite office 10 years ago and there is still a megaton that goes into each new satelite build and launch.
Correction - with current fiber optics in reality, light travels about 31 percent slower through fiber optical cables than it does through a vacuum. There is new research that could allow next gen cables to be 99.7 percent the speed of light but that’s a way off.
Fibers transmit light, not electricity, no? I don't see how that would attract sharks. Also for identifying breaks I'm assuming they're using an OTDR. its a piece of tech that measures reflections in fiber optic cables. In simple terms it shoots out light, if there is a break the light reflects off the break and the OTDR measures the distance from the reflected light. I suppose there could be some sort of tracer? But I'm assuming not since it would have to be extremely well insulated as to not be exposed to the salt water. I terminate/troubleshoot/test fiber optic cable for a living. I don't do much under water work, though, so I could be wrong.
The cables have electric power in them for the optical amplifiers that have to be placed every ~100km or so, or at least the ones he's referencing. Some higher-tech cables don't need electric amplifiers and can go far with just really high transmit power.
~Ponders the awesomeness of being entertained and educated by a man speaking to the world from the European continent while I myself am at the heart of the North American one.~
13:27 - As archaic as "laying cables on the ocean floor" might seem, information still needs to travel along a physical medium. And currently we simply don't know of any other reliable method other than glass fibers. Sure, at some point quantum physics might provide us with another method (e.g. quantum entanglement), but that will first have prove its worth. Great video either way .. Thanks.
Fiber Optics are here to stay. The huge bandwidth offered cannot be rivaled by radio waves, not even close. Man will have to come up with a new communication medium.
A lot of us Australians talk about the under sea cables quite a lot. Mostly swearing at arseholes that drag their anchor over it or pull it up and damage it 🤬
@ 2:48 Simon, I hate to burst your bubble but if you're talking underwater fiber optic cables then the speed of light through the fiber is a function of it's refractive index. For conversations sake let's say the single mode fiber has a core index of refraction of 1.5... by it's own very definition the speed of light in the cable is only 0.67c... given by the reciprocal of the fiber index. 1/1.5 = 0.66666. Thought you might like this tidbit of info. Keep up the great work!!
Always been fascinated by sea cables just how immense a task it is to lay these for thousands of miles and at great depths. The earlier cables were copper they were insulated with even oil in one of those insulations. Amazing they are picked up and repaired when necessary! Mankind is ingenious! Thank you you do a great job. Be well stay safe.
Also a number of years ago a balloon or satellite Landing in a couple's backyard where it was not all burned up or anything like that there is news footage of it
Starlink is looking very promising for global satellite internet. The huge reduction of cost achieved by landing the first stage makes it a much more tenable goal. Once starship is operational, spaceflight will be even cheaper because they will recover the first and second stages.
I was surprised how few strands are in the undersea cables. Most modern fiber runs underground for companies like verizon are 864 and 1728 fibers which they branch down to 1 or 2 by the time they get to the home depending on if its single or duplex. (yes this is very much oversimplified for space reasons)
oh hey, little 2023 update for you all... we finally got "fibre to the home" here in little old Merrivale, KZN, SA pretty recently (in the grand scheme of things). I think it was mid last year? (: lol.
![Yailin La Mas Viral, @kreizyk.official - Dale 2 (Remix) [Video Oficial]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/JaYHBzgqz94/mqdefault.jpg)
"you might not think about your emails in quite the same way again"
yes, i shall now always call them, sea-mails
You should be tried at the Hague for that one
@@Groovewonder2 I'll testify if they will have me.
@@Groovewonder2 I second
Sounds like the name of a spongebob episode
Ellen Icklenellie Rose, is that you?
"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.
Here in Australia when they started building our fibre to the home broadband network idiots would say “why bother with fibre when wireless will replace it”. Fibre optic cables will never be obsolete and we are always finding new ways to shove more information down those same fibre optic cable that were layed years ago.
Wireless can’t ever hope to carry the same bandwidth as fibre or carry it over the same kinds of distances. The amount of radio spectrum available is limited as well whereas there is no spectrum limit to fibre optic cables, you can just continue laying more cables add infinitum and they never interfere with each other, unlike radio spectrum.
I co-run a internet and communications company too , and this comment is spot on , fiber is the way that a lot of people get connection, or if not fiber , point to point connection is pretty common too , at least in my area.
I am a fiber optics splicer. And EVERYTHING runs on fiber.
I’m a splicer in the Midwest and the fiber backbone is supposedly going to be in place by 2023 but I think 2025 is more likely judging by my last 20 years of experience in roll outs of projects
@@David-lr2vi that's the best part about optical fiber (and specifically, single mode optical fiber) your fiber that's carrying 1 Gbps today can be upgraded to 100 Gbps by just swapping the transceivers at each end--no need to replace the fiber itself. And even with the ultra-dense multiterrabit speeds of today's backbone networks, we're no where close to fiber's theoretical maximum bandwidth.
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!
70% is being generous. This is also one of the selling points of Starlink.
What he said. I think even 70% is high. It’s closer to (a little over) half. This is the whole selling point of Starlink. The faster signal in a vacuum means they can shave more than a couple ms off.
68.1% (1/1.467 give or take) And then there's this: www.extremetech.com/computing/151498-researchers-create-fiber-network-that-operates-at-99-7-speed-of-light-smashes-speed-and-latency-records
Thing is though in most networks the dominant latency factor is due to routing/switching and buffering/queuing.
So speed is the reason for low orbits ?
"Pirates stole 11km worth of cable that linked Thailand, Vietnam, and Hong Kong."
DAMN YOU INTERNET PIRATES!
nah, you don't reinvent the wheel, cable is probably going to last for a long time, just like non-flying-cars
"And it ushered in a new age of friendship and cooperation"...giggle, "spoiler it did not." HAHAHAHAhahahh...silence...tears.
Just think about how much of the fiberoptic cable traffic is just porn
Just imagine fishes swimming near those cables be like: why suddenly i feel horney 😂
Pitifully....
"On average about twenty-eight percent of daily internet traffic is porn."
"When I'm on there, it's thirty." - Erlich Bachman
@@lauraowen8142 why? Some of the oldest art we have could be considered pornographic.
@@lauraowen8142 we get it, you're vegan. 🙄
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
So the next time Someone says they didn't get my email I can assume a shark ate it?
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.
may the guardian angels protect these cables.
🙏💜🙏
_*laughs in future Starlink customer_
The cables and equipment get damaged or impaired all the time. You never notice it.
Posiedon and the Atlantians do
no need, starlink on the way
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 !
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....! 🤷🏻♂️
Well done! I'm in the industry and you did a great job of explaining.
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.
He also didn't mention StarLink. That'll make microwave obsolete due to cost/speed.
Suggestion, again: the construction of Disneyworld: From swamp land to land of magic and dreams.
It's still a swamp, it's just now covered in sparkles and talking rats...
I pray for the swamps to return.
@@MashMonster69 I concur, the Orlando traffic is forever screwed up for all eternity on I-4
considering how little was done to the swamp itself... meh, its just like a basic housing complex super sized+some utility tunnels and more screaming children and rats(big and small)
@@mistbooster I'm sure I sound bitter, but 6 rides in a whole day because the lines are so long? Then lunch. Outback Steakhouse prices for food that would allegedly embarass a McDonalds employee.
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).
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.
I remember watching TV, usually live newscasts, where the sound and video would be sent y different methods. . . some cable, some satellite (I’m inferring), resulting in noticeable synchronization problems between sound and picture. Even now, sometimes when I’m watching a bicycle race from Europe on the internet, I’ve seen discrepancies ad much as 15 seconds, but that must be due to something else entirely.
This is exactly why satellite tv and radio work excellently, but satellite internet is terrible. On the other hand Starlink's LEO satellites are a different story. People think of space as really far away, but most people on earth are closer to space than they are to an ocean... 100km or 62 miles. So Low Earth Orbit satellites can be very quick both ways, but they are still limited in bandwidth compared to a wire. what-if.xkcd.com/58/
I remember those overseas calls with the delay. There would always be a few moments of awkwardness when talking over the person you were speaking to. Much quicker now.
Can still see the delay with reporters ? Lot of videos show the reporter waiting
2:36 lol the voice crack and then the look around like, i guess we're still filming..
10:30 These scouting ships also have to assess the makeup of the seabed to make sure that the cable will either bury itself or can be buried by a high pressure water jet from a deep water trenching machine out to a certain depth to keep the cables protected from anchors, nets, marine life, etc.
11:15 There are also amplifiers every ~70km. These require power, which is provided to them in the areas around the core. (That size isn't just for "bigger is better".) That power comes from on-shore power plants (both ends). Yes. It's like one of those overhead electric lines spanning the ocean floor and runs at up to 20kv. Given the distances involved, you have to do that if you want the power to reach all the way through without burning up the cable.
England: Greetings subjects of the crown,
16 hours later,
America: hey, wat up
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?
I second this.
I third this.
Hmm, yeah. I'll watch it. For sure
Sounds like my girlfriend to me ...
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.
They probably thought no one would put in the effort required to try and tap it.
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!
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.
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*
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.
Optical time domain reflectometer
@@psychiatry-is-eugenics They are pretty cool instruments.
We had a fibre problem between locations, the link was 2.4km. I blasted the OTDR on the link and a big attenuation showed up 622m from the test point.
Got the papers to go and check it out and found the issue in the exact place the plans indicated. Bad splice in an underground conduit.
OTDR is an amazing tool.
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.
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)
The performance for telephone communication is much better with cable.
40-50 years ago there was an annoying delay when talking to a person on another continent because of the time it took for radio signals to travel to and from satellites.
Now with fiber optics, the delay is hardly noticeable.
As a person who used to design fiber optic computer networks, it is hilarious to watch someone without a technical background try to relate technical information.
Oh ya. Sometimes I consider myself lucky to “just” be studying civil engineering. Lot easier to explain than other technical stuff, I suspect.
Simon - Just got to say that you appear to be the hardest sodding RUclipsr out there! I keep discovering channels you host! Keep up the good and hard work good sir
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 love that you said China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong separately, because that is correct.
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...
Next video on starlink?
Battle for Atlas?
@@acmiguens Spacex's starlink xD
@@johntheux9238 That would be cooler if StarFox was a part of it ;P
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.
Lots of songs. My dad sang an obscure one. A folksong tuber could do an hour show just on that.
Makes you wonder how many thousands of miles of abandoned cables there are going back 150 years.
Need another project. You should cover the automation and technology that allows the major suppliers of the auto industry to deliver huge volume. Most machining suppliers have invested in robotics and automation that allows them to increase volume by a large margin.
No mention of the amazing role the SS Great Eastern played in cabling the world. A boat which would make a great Mega Project of its own.
It always surprises me how many people don't know these cables exist. They have been laying these down for over a century.
@3:36 Buchanan received this communication at a resort hotel in my tiny hometown in Pennsylvania. He was otherwise considered a pretty terrible president.
Brilliantly presented - thanks so much for sharing!
You should have mentioned Global Crossings which went bankrupt laying most of the fiber optic cable layed in the 1990's. Their work laid the foundation of our modern international fiber optic cabled network.
Mariana Trench is 7 miles deep at 3 knots a friend of mine used to lay that cable from San Francisco, he said it used to take forever.
Thanks Simon. Just contributing to the undersea internet traffic!
Two suggestions:
Star Link
Star Citizen
I love the idea of doing a video game! Star Citizen is a good option.
@@balthazargelos7157 Star Citizen does not qualify. There are actually _many_ games that qualify for it ahead of Star Citizen.
Stargate
@@danielduncan6806 Star Sitizen is more of a Blaze material, honestly.
@@danielduncan6806 Oh wow! The person who gets to determine what does and doesn't qualify is here! Mind if I ask what you were thinking on the 5 years soviet plans?
I mean, it is old fashioned. Because we started this with Telegraph cables. Now we're doing it for high speed internet 🤷🏽♀️
There's a good reason for submarine cables being proffered over satellite links for some financial transactions. Speed. Satellite links may involve up and down hops. In the days before low earth orbit satellite constellations the time delay was enough for submarine to be just at bit (!) quicker. Time is money when buying or selling shares - get your order in first and make moe profit before your order changed the price.
The thing with satellites is that the vast majority of the available tech we have, that has the required range, is really crap at bidirectional communication. This is something most people who have ever used satellite internet connectivity can surely attest to, at least anecdotally. So in most such scenarios, we usually don't actually do bidirectional through satellite, only incoming to the end user, and then use land lines or cellular networks for outgoig data. And if we were to try to overcome this with using traditional copper and fiber domestically, and then aggregate that at a few central points with more capable satellite tech, say bonce radio signal off one or more satellites for signal between the UK and US... Then we very quickly hit a rock wall of bandwidth. Some may think that the relatively high bandwidth range of radio waves should be able to accommodate huge amounts of bandwidth. And in a sense that's certainly true, but that also severely underestimate how much bandwidth we consume. The limits of RF is simply wholly inadequate for our needs. As of today, only light can accommodate the extreme frequencies we need,to pack enough data within the medium's available frequency band.
0:17 Video about underwater cables, and he starts by saying "So... lets jump in" (splash)
And to think: No Cables = No Simon
simon will disappear if you cut the cables
Another thing many people tend to forget about our modern communication society is how much energy all that stuff consumes.
And to be failr laying a cable on the ocean floor might sound difficult and expensive but if you look at the map it becomes obvious that laying cables on land is even more difficult/expensive.
Very happy to see you video SER THANK YOU VERY MUCH WISHING YOU PLESEND WEEKEND.
No joke, I was actually wondering about this last week.
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!!
I work for one of the biggest fiber connection operators in the world, and we still get customers complain that they're getting 250ms+ of latency in connecting between India and California. It is SO annoying dealing with people who understand nothing about physics.
Maybe a follow-9n piece on how we've been continually finding new ways to pump more and more data through the danged things?
Light communications is finally catching up to RF - instead of on/off keying (worked up to 10G), we're finally using complex analog waveforms to give us 100G, and in some places 400G.
Also, using orthogonal polarizations of light to double data rates (per "color"), and using as much as 128 "colors" of light on a single fiber.
All, of course, because it's cheaper to upgrade the LTE than it is to lay new cables
Now we need a video about undersea power cables
Ivy Bell might be worth going into in more details on SIdeprojects, as it's a really interesting story.
Surely the use of cables makes sense, not only from a cost point of view, but also given the ever present risk of a large Carrington event-style CME that could easily turn satellites into orbiting piles of rare metal scrap?
Simon,still waiting for you to do a video about the original world trade center that was destroyed on september 11th,2001
The Rideau Canal would be a great idea after the canadian shot.
"Cables now, cables tomorrow, and cables FOREVER!"
That was amazing, just out of curiosity what do they do with no longer used cables ?, there must be hundreds of thousands of tons of copper & other reusable materials down there, please tell me they don't just leave it there ?.
They just leave it there. Too expensive to recover.
I don't think I saw any mention of the need for undersea repeaters, to boost the signal. I think these are spaced about 20km apart and are usually powered by kilovolts worth of power. If you really want to go deep, you could mention the use of erbium doped amplifiers - the benefit of these is that the optical signal can remain optical and doesn't need to be converted back to an electrical signal, boosted then converted back again to an optical signal. I think I'm right in saying that it's the use of the kilovolts worth of power (or the electric field from it) that attracts the sharks.
I laid a cable in the sea once. Big mistake, it just floats up around your head
Simon, i think perhaps you should do something along the lines of evolution of the motor vehicle, as so many believe that Ford is the like the first car when in fact Ford was just the first to mass produce on a assembly line, but it was Europe that came up with the first car....
Hi Simon, I'm once again asking you to cover Denver International Airport.
It's the second largest airport in the world, fifth busiest in the USA, and one of the top 25 busiest in the world.
In true mega projects fashion, it went over budget, took too long to build, and has a host of conspiracy theories around it.
I think you'd enjoy covering it, and I'd love to see a hometown landmark shown on this channel!
These cables vunerable to all sorts of things together with spoofing of GPS signals that our weapons use.
Another good one Simon thanks for the information
They should render seafloor maps to make a 1st person view vid of info going through ocean topography
BTW - Newfoundland was NOT part of Canada at the time. It was a Dominon the same as Australia, Canada, New Zealand...
I remember our company's WAN being affected when the Sea-We-Me-3 cable was damaged off India's West coast by a shipwreck that sank directly onto the cable in a storm
Just a friendly note that the statement that the speed of information transfer in the cable at 2:47 that it travels at 99.7% of the speed of light is incorrect. The information transfer is about 2/3 of the speed of light in the cable, give or take some based on whether its fiber-optic or wire. In space, the information can transfer between satellites at near the speed of light, thus meaning lower theoretical latency. It is likely that you mixed up these two figures.
I would argue that the main reason that we use undersea cables rather than satellites is that, historically speaking, the cost of bandwidth for these kinds of satellites was absolutely unacceptable in comparison. It is possible that years from now we will be using LEO satellites instead, but the technology to make the antenna to talk to such satellites was not as readily available outside of military applications until more recently, and it wasn't even a consideration many decades ago.
How about a megaproject video on launching satellites into space. I worked for Lockheed Martin’s satellite office 10 years ago and there is still a megaton that goes into each new satelite build and launch.
Correction - with current fiber optics in reality, light travels about 31 percent slower through fiber optical cables than it does through a vacuum. There is new research that could allow next gen cables to be 99.7 percent the speed of light but that’s a way off.
Fibers transmit light, not electricity, no? I don't see how that would attract sharks. Also for identifying breaks I'm assuming they're using an OTDR. its a piece of tech that measures reflections in fiber optic cables. In simple terms it shoots out light, if there is a break the light reflects off the break and the OTDR measures the distance from the reflected light. I suppose there could be some sort of tracer? But I'm assuming not since it would have to be extremely well insulated as to not be exposed to the salt water. I terminate/troubleshoot/test fiber optic cable for a living. I don't do much under water work, though, so I could be wrong.
The cables have electric power in them for the optical amplifiers that have to be placed every ~100km or so, or at least the ones he's referencing. Some higher-tech cables don't need electric amplifiers and can go far with just really high transmit power.
@@thelight3112 ah makes sense. I feel like that would be pretty finicky.
~Ponders the awesomeness of being entertained and educated by a man speaking to the world from the European continent while I myself am at the heart of the North American one.~
Smashed that like button for Simon switching to Shatner-voice for the last few words of the intro.
Couple things are off but always entertaining.
Hey Simon! You may want to make a video about the cellular system & how it works, because a lot of people have ZERO clue!!!
13:27 - As archaic as "laying cables on the ocean floor" might seem, information still needs to travel along a physical medium. And currently we simply don't know of any other reliable method other than glass fibers. Sure, at some point quantum physics might provide us with another method (e.g. quantum entanglement), but that will first have prove its worth.
Great video either way .. Thanks.
Two words: Subspace Radio.
Fiber Optics are here to stay. The huge bandwidth offered cannot be rivaled by radio waves, not even close. Man will have to come up with a new communication medium.
A-10 thunderbolt would be a great video, like this if you want simon to do it as he only takes top rated suggestions
A good mega-project that set the standards on evacuation processes for large numbers of people: The Mississauga Disaster (1979?).
As always, great video, thank you
A lot of us Australians talk about the under sea cables quite a lot. Mostly swearing at arseholes that drag their anchor over it or pull it up and damage it 🤬
@ 2:48 Simon, I hate to burst your bubble but if you're talking underwater fiber optic cables then the speed of light through the fiber is a function of it's refractive index. For conversations sake let's say the single mode fiber has a core index of refraction of 1.5... by it's own very definition the speed of light in the cable is only 0.67c... given by the reciprocal of the fiber index. 1/1.5 = 0.66666. Thought you might like this tidbit of info. Keep up the great work!!
I was doing a zoom call and screen sharing with my European colleague today. The under water cables are amazing
Always been fascinated by sea cables just how immense a task it is to lay these for thousands of miles and at great depths. The earlier cables were copper they were insulated with even oil in one of those insulations. Amazing they are picked up and repaired when necessary! Mankind is ingenious! Thank you you do a great job. Be well stay safe.
That "zimmermann telegram" seems like a big conspiracy topic.
Also a number of years ago a balloon or satellite Landing in a couple's backyard where it was not all burned up or anything like that there is news footage of it
Starlink is looking very promising for global satellite internet. The huge reduction of cost achieved by landing the first stage makes it a much more tenable goal. Once starship is operational, spaceflight will be even cheaper because they will recover the first and second stages.
Erie Canal dawgggg! 15 miles Simon! Episode by Christmas!
This makes me wonder about how many "data heists" have been attempted via collecting data from cables.
I was surprised how few strands are in the undersea cables. Most modern fiber runs underground for companies like verizon are 864 and 1728 fibers which they branch down to 1 or 2 by the time they get to the home depending on if its single or duplex. (yes this is very much oversimplified for space reasons)
oh hey, little 2023 update for you all... we finally got "fibre to the home" here in little old Merrivale, KZN, SA pretty recently (in the grand scheme of things). I think it was mid last year? (: lol.
10:23 nah, I think we all have some experience in that
Amazing video. Love this type of engineering detail