BACK REFLECTION
OUR DIGITAL REVOLUTION IS ENABLED BY ANALOG SUBMARINE CABLES! BY JOSÉ CHESNOY INTRODUCTION
It is now well known that the digital revolution is relying on the submarine cables digital highways. What is not usually shared is the paradox that submarine cable wet plant is everything but a digital system. Let us look how things moved that way.
THE FIRST DAYS OF DIGITAL SUBMARINE CABLES
The rationale behind the launch of the optical system was the first pressure of the digitalization of telecommunication. In years 1980, the telephonic equipment and thus the transmission technologies migrated to digital. The analog coaxial cable was simply unable to permit this transition and one could observe that the analog coaxial submarine cables and soon the analog radio satellites were connecting digital continental islands. The first optical submarine optical cables have solved this issue by the introduction of the optical fiber. Reference Books document the historical aspects [Ref. 1] and more recently their technical aspects [Ref.2] up to our modern optical cable technology. The early epic of optical submarine cables was the heart of an industrial battle leading to the first cable lay “Antibes –Port Grimaud” described in a previous issue of SubTel Forum magazine |Ref. 3]. Then, with the deployment of the large transoceanic systems TAT-8 in 1988 and soon TPC-3, not only the terminal became digital, matching the terrestrial network
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SUBMARINE TELECOMS MAGAZINE