City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics

210 CITY OF LIGHT
bles, and the French Submarcom consortium were the only bidders. AT&T
tried to land the entire project, citing the hydrogen problem in the Loch Fyne
cable. 33 However, the cozy little world of international telephony usually split
contracts to assuage politicians and corporations. In the end, AT&T got the
lion’s share of the $335 million contract, from America to the branch point.
STL got the British section, and Submarcom the French part. 34
A transpacific consortium was just months behind TAT-8, with service to
start in 1989. Cables had lagged far behind satellites across the wider Pacific.
Submarine cables carried just under a thousand voice circuits from California
to Japan in 1984; 1460 more went from Canada to Australia via Hawaii. 35
AT&T landed a contract to build the Hawaii-4 cable from California to Hawaii,
and the part of Trans-Pacific Cable 3 from Hawaii to a branching point off
Japan. The Japanese Ocean Cable consortium won the contract to build the
rest of the system.
Meanwhile, work on smaller submarine cables went much faster. For each
massive cable like TAT-8, there are dozens of short ones, typically linking
offshore islands to the mainland or other islands, or linking major coastal
cities. The high capacity and long repeater spacing possible with fibers also
were important for many of these systems. British Telecom was the first to
use a fiber cable for a short submarine link carrying regular traffic. In 1984,
it laid an eight-kilometer (five-mile) fiber cable from the coastal city of Portsmouth
to the Isle of Wight in the English Channel. STC supplied the hardware,
which carried 140 million bits per second over each of four pairs of singlemode
fibers. The whole system cost just $292,000 and contained no repeaters,
but it was a first. 36
More important was the first fiber-optic addition to the array of cables
crossing the English Channel, UK-Belgium 5. Traffic was growing between
Britain and Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands; the carriers needed more
capacity, and they wanted digital transmission. STC won the job by offering
to lay a ‘‘fully engineered prototype’’ that would start with experimental service,
then phase into regular use. A dozen cables already ran from Britain to
Belgium and the Netherlands, carrying just over 23,000 voice circuits. 37 The
fiber cable carried 11,500 voice circuits on three pairs of single-mode fibers
operating at 280 million bits per second. The three repeaters in the 122kilometer
(76-mile) cable were the first on a submarine fiber cable to carry
regular telephone traffic. 38
Laying the main part of the cable took just five days in early 1986, although
it had to be buried in the seabed to prevent damage from trawlers
and ship anchors. A second cable ship laid the rest of the cable in shallower
water, where a submersible trencher buried it deeper in the sea bed. Tests
began as soon as engineers hooked up the cable; commercial service formally
began October 30, 1986, with a two-way video conference between London
and Ostend, Belgium. 39
The Japanese bounced back from the hydrogen scare and kept pace. NTT
designed a system to transmit 400 million bits per second between islands in
the Japanese archipelago. After two years of shallow-water tests, in November