Say goodbye to the submarine 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 collectively not guilty of most, if not all, charges of biting, gnawing, chewing, or attacking an underwater fiber optic cable network. The people who build and maintain the nearly 600 submarine cables that carry nearly all of our transcontinental traffic—which support nearly every swipe, click, zoom, and swipe anywhere on the planet—have a love-hate relationship with this myth, one that has persisted for decades. They probably hate that I’m starting this piece with it.

If a cable is suspended above the sea floor, a shark may attach to it while exploring. Sometimes they rush towards a cable being pulled out of the water. But to get an actual cable to bite a shark, you’d have to wrap it in fish, just like you would hide a pill in a hunk of cheese for a dog. Mice can be a threat to the floor, because their incisors never stop growing, so they like to keep them on semi-smooth cables. But no one ever asks about the rats, perhaps because, as one of my friends pointed out, “Sharks make you calm, but rats make you look like you have a problem.”

Sometimes people ask about satellites, or in Sweden especially (where I live), they ask about alleged acts of sabotage in the Baltic Sea. But historically, shark bites have received the most attention. The legend began nearly 40 years ago, with the development of the undersea fiber optic cable known as TAT-8. The TAT-8 practically invented the concept of Internet cable, and now that it’s ready for retirement, I’ve spent time with offshore workers, crew members, and engineers in the process of pulling it from the seabed. This is the true story of submarine cables, not vandalism or sharks, but the humans who take care of the physical things that keep our digital communications flowing.

Optical fibers are transmitted An almost magical method of transmitting information by means of pulses of light. Most people don’t even think about how quickly we will accept instant communications as normal, even those of us who can remember when an international phone call had to be booked in advance. The more people I meet in this industry, in this web of networks of people and things, the more insulting it seems to hear that “we” only notice it when it breaks. (Who is this “we,” that I always want to know?) Billions of people can wander without noticing this infrastructure because of the daily work of a few thousand people, sometimes at sea, sometimes buried under piles of permits, surveys and purchase orders for thousands of kilometers of cable that will join the millions of kilometers of cable on the seabed that ensure our planet is constantly embraced by light.

I also need to clarify something else. Most people call them “Internet cables”, but technically, fiber optic transmission was developed for telephone calls. One of the people involved was an English scientist named Alec Reeves, who also spent his time working on psychokinesis and telepathy. Using fibres, sounds become light, pulse through thin glass strands like a spider’s web, and become sounds back into your phone on the other end. There’s probably not a big conceptual leap between that and moving things with your mind.

TAT is short for Trans-Atlantic Telephone, and TAT-8 – created by AT&T, British Telecom and France Telecom – was the eighth transatlantic system. It was the first to use optical fibers to transmit traffic between Europe and the United States. Optical fibers for communications were only theoretically developed in the 1960s, and underground cables were first used in the 1970s. But using this technology to transcend continents was practically tantamount to human expansion into the galaxy.

When TAT-8 entered service on December 14, 1988, science fiction writer Isaac Asimov spoke via video link from New York to audiences in Paris and London: “Welcome everyone to this historic transatlantic crossing, this first voyage across the sea on a beam of light.” AT&T ran a television ad in which earnest voiceovers promised a “global intelligent network” where people could send information in any format to anyone they wanted. A montage of phone operators noted: “This is the AT&T operator. Do you have a call booked for Poland?” “I have your call to Russia.” “What city are you calling from in Cuba?” If they were looking to inspire viewers, it was not with the promise of the Internet, which was still too convenient for most of us to understand, but with the end of the Cold War.