You can read this article from virtually anywhere in the world. And, most likely, this page will load in a couple of seconds.
Those times when image pixels were loaded line by line, are gone.
Now even HD video is available almost everywhere. What made the Internet so fast? Because it moves at the speed of light.
This article was written with the support of EDISON.
We develop geographic information systems , as well as create web applications and sites .
We love the world wide web! ;-)
Information Superhighway
For the miracle of modern fiber optics, we owe this man -
Narinder Singh Kapani . The young physicist did not believe his professors that light "always moves only in a straight line." His studies of the behavior of light ultimately led to the creation of fiber optics (in fact, a ray of light moving inside a thin glass tube).
The next step to using fiber optics as a means of communication was to reduce the rate of attenuation of light when passing through the cable. Throughout the 1960s and 70s, various companies made progress in production by reducing the amount of interference and allowing light to travel long distances without significantly reducing signal intensity.
By the mid-1980s, long-distance cabling of fiber-optic cables was finally nearing the stage of practical implementation.
Crossing the ocean
The first intercontinental fiber optic cable was laid across the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean in 1988. This cable, known as
TAT-8 , was laid by three companies: AT&T, France Télécom and British Telecom. The cable was the equivalent of 40 thousand telephone channels, which is ten times more than that of its galvanic predecessor, the TAT-7 cable.
TAT-8 does not appear in the video above since it was decommissioned in 2002.From the moment when all the bends of the new cable were configured, information gateways opened. In the 90s, many more cables lay on the ocean floor. By the millennium, all continents (except Antarctica) were already connected by fiber-optic cables. The Internet has begun to take shape.
As you can see in the video, in the early 2000s there was a boom in the laying of submarine cables, reflecting the growth of the Internet around the world. Only in 2001, eight new cables connected North America and Europe.
In the 2016–2020s, more than a hundred new cables were laid, their cost is estimated at $ 14 billion. Now even the most remote Polynesian islands have access to high-speed Internet thanks to submarine cables.
The volatile nature of global cable construction
Although almost all corners of the globe are now physically interconnected, the pace of cabling is not slowing down.
This is due to the increased capacity of new cables and our growing appetites for high-quality video content. New cables are extremely efficient: the bulk of the potential throughput along the main cable routes relates to cables that are no more than five years old.
Previously, cable consortiums were paid for by consortia of telecommunications companies or governments. Nowadays, technological giants are increasingly financing their own submarine cable networks.
Amazon, Microsoft, and Google own nearly 65% of the cloud storage market. No wonder they would also like to control the physical means of transporting this information.
These three companies now own 63,605 miles of submarine cables. Despite the fact that cable laying is an expensive pleasure, the offer is barely keeping pace with demand - the share of content providers in data transmission has soared from about 8% to almost 40% in the last decade alone.
A bright future for a faded past
At the same time, it is planned (and implemented) to disconnect obsolete cables. And although the signals no longer pass through this grid of “darkened” fiber, it can still do a good job. It turns out that underwater telecommunication cables form a very efficient seismic network, helping researchers study marine earthquakes and geological structures at the bottom of the ocean.
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