City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics

SUBMARINE CABLES 213
ous.’’ 51 As a frequent international caller, I knew better; satellites still had
delays and bad circuits. Each side claimed its service was cheaper, but satellites
were in retreat. As plans for new cables proliferated, the satellite industry
quietly turned to routes not well served by fiber cables and services other
than telephony, including video and data communications.
TAT-8 planners came remarkably close to their original plans of starting
operation in July 1988. Ironically, the delays were due to relatively mundane
electronic components, not fibers, cable, or lasers. AT&T had problems with
one component; Submarcom had problems with another. 52 In August, AT&T’s
cable ship Long Lines laid its portion of the cable, stopping at the branch point
off the French coast; French and British cable ships met it and laid the rest
of the cable from the branch point to land. 53 After a few months of testing,
the cable went on line in late December, 54 beating Alec Reeves’s prediction
of two decades earlier. By then, the Long Lines had almost finished laying the
first transpacific fiber-optic cable.
The job was not finished. Strong currents off the French coast exposed the
buried cable, and trawlers snagged it in February and March, damaging the
wires carrying repeater power. In March, an electrical fault knocked out
the British leg of the cable; calls had to be rerouted via satellite until repairs
were finished and the cable buried deeper in early April. 55 Meanwhile, the
transpacific cable began service to Japan.
The new cables did not revolutionize international communications overnight,
but I could see the improvement. My calls to London were more likely
to go through at the peak hours for transatlantic business. I got fewer bad
circuits with maddening echoes or dead air from England. More and more
calls were as clear as any long-distance call made over fiber-optic lines in
America. The most reliable sign of a transatlantic call became an English
accent on the other end.
Better Technology
Better technology brought higher cable capacity at lower cost per channel.
The demand for international telecommunications exploded, filling TAT-8 to
capacity soon after it began service. TAT-10 and-11 followed with the same
1.55-micrometer technology as TAT-9.
Meanwhile, a new technology arrived that dramatically improved submarine
cables—optical amplifiers that increase the strength of a light signal
without first converting it to some other form. Alec Reeves had seen the
advantage of that approach back in the late 1960s, but he had thought
semiconductor devices would do the job. The new technology, fiber amplifiers,
grew from ideas Eli Snitzer developed in the early 1960s as he moved from
fiber optics to lasers at American Optical.
Lasers are light amplifiers. Shine the right wavelength into a laser, and
the light stimulates excited atoms to emit more light at that wavelength—
precisely in step with the input light. Radio astronomers use masers, the