I remember when I was little, growing up when cellphones were becoming more popular and common, I always thought that wireless signals would go to a cell tower, bounce up to a satellite, and go back down to another cell tower near the destination. But nope lol. It's all just big fat wires that go over land and under sea.
This is a solid comment. God I remember being a kid and getting that playing soccer. Wondering what I can do to solve this. It's all in the briefs fellas!
Yes, "gutta-perka" is a funny word when pronounced that way. The second half is actually pronounced "perch-a" and it's used today in root canal surgery to backfill the hole in the tooth root and prevent bacterial intrusion.
It's very common in Vietnam, sadly. People also used to literally cut up unexploded Vietnam War bombs to sell the explosives inside. Not sure if they still do it now.
I am a retired splicing technician for the phone company and I have had the pleasure of splicing in a new submarine cable to cut around a damaged section caused by a boat anchor in the Kanawha River. Two days of shift work in a tent by the river to open up the armored cable. splice the 1600 pairs of phone wires to restore service, and then meticulously seal it up and pressure test it. The crossing was well marked and I heard the barge operator got some healthy fines. Someone had to pay for our hard work! :)
Kind of crazy that copper is nearly dead now. It is worth more to scrap all the copper and put a few fibers in place of a 1600 pair that can handle infinitely more data and pick up the same amount of customers with just a couple of pairs of fiber.
I stayed at bed and breakfast down near Gig Harbor Washington, home to one of the most massive Naval bases on the US West coast. We got inside, and the hostess were a homemaker and a man retired out of the navy. While she was showing my wife the decorating, he took me downstairs to his man cave / bar for a drink. On the bar was a weird item in a glass presentation case. He asked me to guess what it was and me knowing quite a bit about things immediately identified it as a section of an undersea Communications cable. This man was the former commander of the nuclear submarine USS Flounder, in a secret Mission decades ago,his crew located on the sea floor, and removd a section of Russian undersea military communications cable and added a recording device and this was a section of that cable taken on that mission.
@@hullinstruments I'd forgotten that part of the mission was to come back multiple times to get the recordings of what was communicated on the cable has no Bluetooth existed. He said it was powered by a SNAP nuclear cell using PU 238, which was at that time, most of what existed in the US inventory at the time.
I too, have a piece of cable from that saga, and also the Korean sites. Our group had a special submersible, which was also used for such missions. Some of their stories were horrifingly blunt, and not for the weak of heart.
Yes.,.it was fascinating hearing those stories. I sat spellbound for a couple hours listening to a UA-cam discussion of that with interviews of you Navy guys. My brother was a Navy lifer and I remember him hinting about secret submarine missions. I could only imagine such things 'till recently! Hey, were those cable samples you guys have wire pairs or optical? It was a little while ago....
@brunonikodemski2420 My uncle and a cousin of his fought in Korea at Pusan reservoir. He told me captured Chinese soliders were killing POWs on orders from their commander. He was captured later in the day, and given a drumhead trial the next morning.
Granted I do mechanical/nuclear engineering but the engineering of communications cable never ceases to amaze me. Had a great Senior Staff I&C engineer teach me all about communications protocols, wiring, how to spec and use it, etc. It all makes the engineering of these undersea cables look like child's play.
Revives memories of how slow the internet was in the 90's because of the lack of undersea cables & the number of personal servers in UK dorm rooms instead of AWS virginia.
A good friend of mine, trained as ME, worked in BL served as Undersea Cable system engineer and dual-reporting to AT&T Undersea Cable business unit in late 80s and on, until sold to Tyco. He said shark bites were/are the common occurrence. We theorized that - in electrical signal transmission, although at T3 speed, the pulses and harmonics emit RFI, electric shield (steel armor as emission shield) does not work too well. - Since the new TAT-8 has just transitioned to optical fibers but the problem still did not go away, so the working theory is magnetism!
Seems like an ideal private industry/government "partnership." If you want a network of hydrophones on the sea bed to track.. aquatic activity.. they naturally need some data communications. And if the cable operator needs amplifiers ("easy") or repeaters (harder/more expensive) those would seem to be an ideal place for such a thing. These days under the Atlantic, you can avoid needing any repeaters -- devices that recover bits and remodulate/retransmit them -- using low dispersion fiber and optical amplifiers. You can deploy an optical amplifier that will increase the signal level of all the wavelengths of light in a fiber used in a DWDM (dense wavelength division multiplexing system.) This is very powerful because it doesn't have to split out each wavelength, detect the signal, retransmit with a laser for each wavelength, and then recombine. The optical amplifier works on all the wavelengths "at once". But this is where you need "low dispersion" fiber. Imagine that you transmit a single pulse of light (on a particular wavelength/color). As those photons propagate down the glass fiber, they don't all take exactly the same path through the glass. So that pulse of light will start to "spread out" as it travels through the fiber. And the problem is that it spreads out too far and smears into the previous and next pulse. Low dispersion fiber is carefully made using magic and physics and fancy manufacturing to keep the photons nudged closer to a single path down the middle of the fiber. The extreme version of this is "single-mode" vs. "multi-mode" fiber. There is an amazing amount of engineering going on with these systems, and over the last decade or two, the systems are constructed to carry data as the first-class, primary customer, rather than synchronous TDM traffic of multiplexed phone calls. The hand-off to customers looks like an ethernet, and cable operators have much more flexible bandwidth allocation tools available that didn't exist in the past with SONET/SDH transport systems.
Hazardous environment justifies the investment of pre build maintenance facilities and repair possibilities thus IMHO never a super long cable without built-in pods. BTW, between technology and political influence, one always wins.
Some of this is undoubtedly true. We had cables which did NOT have a steel cable wrapping, with very high voltages in them. The copper outer shell did not contain magnetic fields hardly at all, and mostly by eddy effects. Leakages were high. We did one job, where the strength members were all Kevlar or Aramid fiber. In that case it did not matter if anyone tapped it, since it was just going to an undersea oil drilling tooling fixture, and everyone knew what was going on.
I've been watching you for years and love the balance you strike between pure facts and good jokes. Thank you for injecting yourself and some lovely comedy into the content :)
Wow, this brought back memories of the days I worked on the USNS Albert J Myer and USNS Zeus, both military submarine cable laying/repair ships.Thanks for the video
At the end of last year a gas line connecting Finland and Estonia and an undersea cable connecting Sweden and Estonia were damaged. It is indeed hard to protect these undersea assets and easy to deniably attack them.
If the cable is considered critical it is possible to trench and bury it some feet deep in the ocean (lake, seabed) bottom. That is also very expensive. But, is done in certain cases.
One of the most interesting aspects of this story, to me, is the lag between the first transatlantic telegraph cable, and the first tele-phone- cable, TAT-1, almost 100 years later!! And half a century after Marconi spanned the Atlantic with radio in 1906. You would think the transistor ultimately enabled it, and of course that had to wait until 1947. But they were new and un-tested. It was all done with tubes.
Bandwidth requirements for telegraph (binary Morse code) and telephone (voice) are RADICALLY different. The capacitance of the cable really affects that - and seawater is a wonderful dielectric (ie a cable under it creates a massive capacitor).
I'm at 4:13 of this video...interesting about the cladding, but a more interesting story is the "co-axial" cable that finally permitted rapid, relatively high bandwidth signaling over oceanic distances. We have the genius Oliver Heaviside to thank for the correct analysis of how to make the signal-carrying element high-bandwidth.
I work for Prysmian. Submarine cable has become one of the primary areas of business for the company and it is pretty cool. Check out their ship for laying submarine cable, the Leonardo da Vinci. It's nuts.
Prysmian recently finished their tower for manufacturing high voltage sea and underground cables here in Finland, Pikkala. I think that they’re only starting the production in 2025 though. I didn’t know that Prysmian had a ship like that, I couldn’t find any information on it by googling though.
@Simon_Denmark Yes, Pikkala is a very large plant for Prysmian. My current HR manager was in charge of HR over all of Finland, based out of Pikkala until she moved here to the US about 18 months ago. I apologize, I had the ship name incorrect, it is the Giulio Verne, but our big ship is the Leonardo da Vinci. It is a massive machine, but I heard that we just invested a half billion dollars to make an even bigger state of the art submarine cable laying ship. I'll edit my original comment and change the name of the ship. Prysmian seems to be taking over energy and electrification when it comes to cable production.
@@brandonmiles8174 Oh that’s cool, thanks for sharing. I definitely know Prysmian as an electrician and soon to be electrical engineer. I don’t work on the sea cabling or wind turbine side, more on the railway side.
As soon as I saw the title of this episode, it became a good day. I was grateful, because till then it had been a bad day, the kind of day that a man thinks back to as he drinks warm $4 sherry behind a Dennys, wondering if that day hadn't been so utterly atrocious, maybe he would be inside paying for fresh pie, instead of outside waiting for whatever is left in pie pans when the pie is gone, the kind of day only a grammatical nightmare of a run on sentence could do justice to. In a moment it changed, and a forlorn future disappeared in a puff of .........I dunno, ran out of drama gas. I do really enjoy this topic, and I know Asianometry will do a great job of covering it. Not sure why I like it so much, but I am saving it for the mid shift grind. Thanks for making my day, hyperbole etc etc.
PBS American Experience did a wonderful video on the transatlantic cable and its a remarkable study in engineering and science. Many of the electrical units we use today were created to study the failure of the first cable (partially because of the enormous monetary loss that is was, and the need to understand what went wrong).
It should be noted that the cable in the thumbnail is a power cable, hence the three large copper conductors. Why three? Three phase power. Some of these cables also carry fibre as a secondary use, which you may as well do if you’re laying the cable at all. I think the Tasmanian-Victorian undersea cable does both, and in fact I think it’s actually the cable pictured, but I can’t remember. In any case, Tasmania imports a good amount of its power from Victoria (which sometimes in turn imports its power from other states) using this cable, and much of their internet traffic is routed through this cable too.
I love these little videos on things that don't need some sort of understanding of a technology like some of your more obscure electrical engineering videos do. Love your channel
A while ago I read about the first transatlantic cable, about the size of a thumb in diameter, and the constant impedance mismatches as the cable played out and strength issues that snapped the cable. The cable was wrapped in....gutta percha. The book was: " Thread Across the Ocean: The Heroic Story of the Transatlantic Cable Paperback - Illustrated, July 1, 2003 by John Steele Gordon
The first undersea telegraph cables were in the 1850s - 1860s and the whole world was connected by about 1900. But all of those cables were just that, a big long wire, and enormous voltages were used to send messages very slowly. Telephone and high speed data needs amplifiers and electronics. That wouldn't happen until 1956 with TAT-1, which had miniature highly reliable vacuum tube amplifiers built into the cable, every hundred miles or so. Up to 36 simultaneous phone calls between Canada/US and the UK.
Burying cables has its problems. If there is a failure of an amplifier, for example, you have to pull the cable to the surface to fix it. That is, once you actually FIND it and can actually get ahold of it. That means removing it from the trench. Once fixed, you have to put it back down. No small feat.
This video is extremely informative for understanding the development of submarine optical cables. As a manufacturer of these cables, I can confidently say that their production involves high complexity and stringent material requirements. Moreover, minimizing the costs associated with maintenance in the long run is crucial😂.
You can buy a GPS unit accurate to about half a foot for under $1,000. Add a laptop with a map of all the undersea structure and fishing fleets would know where every hazard was located and when they are getting close. Adding bottom depth and navigation information might make this something they need to have onboard. It's possible they already have something onboard that only requires an up to date map.
great video as always. you mention at the beginning that the cables carry gigabits of data which is technically true, but we're in the terabit range now.
Sharks find prey and other objects with an organ that can discern electric fields, organic or artificial. They are more than likely able to sense the cable's power output and was attracted to it thinking it might be prey.
Fun fact, under sea communications disruptions were a huge concern for the allies (particularly the USA) in ww2. If disrupted, it meant that the US would have to rely on notoriously unreliable trans-atlantic radio to communicate. Not just that, but of course anyone can hear your transmission then. Obviously this is still a huge concern today. Just, we've had a long time to think about it.
The knowledge gathered in this video is incredible. Clearly and practically, I now know the peculiarities of submarine cables. Very useful for me as I intend to explore this market. Thanks
Why don't the fisherman just trawl with the cables length instead across them? Most likely these fishermen don't even know the location of the cables until they get caught up on one. I just answered my own question.😂
In late 90s and early 2000s i worked for company that built under the ocean fiberoptic network. I was part of building of repeaters that were responsible for amplifing signal every 40 miles. Those cables had fiberoptics and power cables inside. Pretty cool technology
@@StoicGore This video is available for 2 months for Patreons. Im not patreon myself but you can sign in for free and see the release date of each video, and this one is dated 14 April. As a free lurker I cannot click to have further informations.
@@zeropolso then is he privating the videos and just sharing links to patrons? Seems like a stupid way to do it when you can just have members. Also shocking he gate keeps the videos for two months. Most youtubers do it for a week or two at most.
@@hotsauce2446 I don't know the how ( sharing link, membership.. ) and why ( stupidity, others.. ). I don't feel that concerned. But I saw your feeling of mistrust, and I wanted to tell you that it was based on too little information. That's why I subscribed to the free access, and then saw the date of the post was 2 months old. Besides, although we should expect to be disappointed often, not presupposing stupidity in others is a good habit to get into. I swear it could get you out of troubles most often than not, and you will be better prepared to cope any evil genius menacing your interests or abusing your confidence. In the end, although I can't exclude the possibility of view purchases at 100%, the information (also reduced, i.e. the date of the post, the fact that the typical profile of the youtuber who buys views will also clickbait, whereas this is not the case here, and also the low number of these early comments, the fact that the user TheSeet3000 has had an account for 8 years, with playlists) makes me rather confident in the assertion that it is unlikely that these are paid comments. I may be wrong and if more evidence are brought before me I'm ready to shift this assertion.
@@hotsauce2446 I answered but my answer is not displaying so I post again, sorry if this is a double post : I dont know ( like you ) the how ( membership, private sharing... ) nor the why ( stupidity, other.. ), what I saw was your feeling of mistrust and that's why I took the asianometry free access and was able to confirm that the post was two months old like the comment. Because I think you felt it when you had too little information. It's still an accusation of dishonesty towards him, so it's not something to be thrown around lightly, is it? Anyway, it's a good habit not to presuppose the stupidity of others. Both by not underestimating anyone who opposes you, by not hurting other people's feelings, by not missing a subtle message in the discussion, etc. Finally, although I can't exclude the possibility of view purchases at 100%, the information (also limited, i.e. the date of the post, the fact that the typical profile of the youtuber who buys views will also do clickbait, whereas this is not the case here, the low number of these early comments, and the fact that the user TheSeet3000 has had an account for 8 years, with playlists) makes me rather confident in the assertion that it is unlikely that these are paid comments. I could be wrong, and if new evidence is brought before me I may change my mind.
It gets a bit technical but you might enjoy doing some reading on how we "light" these fibers- I'm thinking of submarine DWDM systems specifically but there's other technologies out there. It is tremendously cool stuff
I met a tube collector that had a very old tube that was used in underseas cables. Amazing he had it and is tube collection was huge and he is a great guy to chat with about tubes.
Another kind of cable is high voltage DC cable, or HVDC. They are used to provide electricity power to islands, but in more recent times, they are being used for wind farms.
Maybe the cables should resemble more how the rest of the internet works: a net where some cut strings don't matter. Instead of laying a long line with periodic repeaters, maybe it would be a good idea to lay a net, same distance between repeaters, but the repeaters are also routers able to switch direction of the signal. Also, they are crossings with multiple connected cables (maybe 6 per crossing, making a 60° equidistant triangle mesh). Making the routers plug-and-play with the cables could also vastly reduce the cost of replacing a broken section. Or I have overlooked some reason that is not viable, who knows...
I could give proposals for a 'defended cable strategy' since it appears that there is a need for them. First you need a 'net' like cable that has very large holes, and to do the defending we use drones. Lots, and lots of drones. Cut a cable and the drones swarm from their solar powered platforms, some explosions, threat neutralized. Drones replenish by hopping one platform over all at once and we fill in from the shore.
In reference to that end note, you would be shocked how much of the world's infrastructure is largely unprotected, relying on people to have good intentions to function. Sure, there is built-in redundancies, but in the end, we just hope no one messes with the stuff when it is fairly trivial to do so. The power grid is another such example and every year, in the US alone, there are attacks on it. Thankfully, there are, again, redundancies.
They seem extremely vulnerable to sabotage. I guess the depth does make them quite safe from that though since the average person or even insurgent group probably doesn't have access to deep sea submersibles they could use to get down there to cut them.
Ironically, undersea fiber is more vulnerable to large electromagnetic events (think CME or solar flares) than other kinds of cables. Because of length, conductivity, and the repeaters. The longer the cable, the more sensitive it is (think of the steel and conductive power cabling between repeaters as giant antennas).
Irish built New York, San Fran Cisco tram, the first submarine, many first inventions in medical tech and vaccines and now this. My fellow Irish men and women are something else altogether. 😄🇮🇪
As far as sharks biting the undersea cables goes, perhaps the sharks are detecting small electric currents from the cables. Sharks have organs adapted to detect small electric currents in the water which are made by the muscles of animals in the water, so if the sharks detect the electric currents from these undersea cables, they might mistake them for potential prey.
When I saw this video in my notifications I was talking to my hubby. I ended my sentence saying (in a playful way) "...and shut up. A new Asianometry just dropped." Then I played your video.
I think it's funny how much modern global internet and communications depend on these undersea cables, yet, at least in my experience, many people don't even or barely know they even exist, let alone how important they are. Thank you for another informative video! I look forward to the next one! God be with you out there, everybody. ✝️ :)
An undersea repeater is definitively something I want to take apart, but it seems they are not common to find in "for parts or repair" condition and price on eBay 🤔
who is "the guy that she told you not to worry about"?.... I've had one or two of those. I was told they were married and had kids and I was being paranoid. the first time I was right and got a divorce. the second time I knew I was right, but decided to live in ignorance. I dont know whats worse.
I love your style - 100% info 0% filler Too many creators weigh their videos those with too much comedic elemants to the point they might as well produce a comedy show. So thx ^^
One of the theories as to why sharks bite fiber optic cables is that the nonlinear optics in the repeaters require a power source, so the cable carries both fiber optic and copper for electric power. Sharks are sensitive to electric fields and mistake the cable as prey.
Sharks use a form of electrosensory from their snouts. They use it to find close prey since their eyes are typically on the side of their head. They cant actually see what they are biting oftimes so they use the electric sensory in their noses. The sharks are probably thinking its food and taking a nibble or the current simulates a prey item. :)
Always wanted to start collecting cross section specimens for various under sea cables. Would look so good with my semiconductor/test gear collections!
There are also documented "russian special cables operations", to tap and place listening devices on the cables which frequently resulting in damaging or even accidentally cutting the cables by the sub.
Last teadlast year autumn russia also destroyed cables under the Baltic Sea between Estonia and Sweden and also power cables between Finland and Estonia.
You know those movies where animals are the protagonists, like War Horse (2011) or Weiner Dog (2016)? A movie about a whale or shark encountering an undersea cable would be an interesting addition to that genre.
It's so wild that basically all the information exchanged by humanity gets squeezed down to a few choke points
at terrabits per second rate in one tiny cable it is insane
Makes it easier on the NSA
@@Bob-jn8gt ding ding ding ding
I remember when I was little, growing up when cellphones were becoming more popular and common, I always thought that wireless signals would go to a cell tower, bounce up to a satellite, and go back down to another cell tower near the destination. But nope lol. It's all just big fat wires that go over land and under sea.
@@littlekirby6 I mean that logic honestly does make sense compared to a lot of little kid thinking
Chafing is one of my most insidious natural hazards too
When it comes to sports and fitness, chafing really is an issue.
This is a solid comment. God I remember being a kid and getting that playing soccer. Wondering what I can do to solve this. It's all in the briefs fellas!
@@Pr0toPoTaT0 for me it was non-contact football, just wearing the scratchy jerseys... no undershirt... nips weren't the same for days
@@BobConnor-n2g and work
Mine is good ol monkey butt!
Yes, "gutta-perka" is a funny word when pronounced that way. The second half is actually pronounced "perch-a" and it's used today in root canal surgery to backfill the hole in the tooth root and prevent bacterial intrusion.
Also, imagine literally digging up undersea cables to scrap copper, mental.
All for a tiny bit of copper, wrapped up in tons of plastic, steel and seaground
If they could, they would…
It's very common in Vietnam, sadly.
People also used to literally cut up unexploded Vietnam War bombs to sell the explosives inside. Not sure if they still do it now.
I'd assume they themselves didn't have access to the internet, so nothing lost for them...
@@DRakeTRofKBamthat was no "tiny bit" of copper. I bet they made a fortune
I am a retired splicing technician for the phone company and I have had the pleasure of splicing in a new submarine cable to cut around a damaged section caused by a boat anchor in the Kanawha River. Two days of shift work in a tent by the river to open up the armored cable. splice the 1600 pairs of phone wires to restore service, and then meticulously seal it up and pressure test it. The crossing was well marked and I heard the barge operator got some healthy fines. Someone had to pay for our hard work! :)
Gooood forrrr youuuu
Thank you for the interesting story. Cool insights into real world experience.
Thank you. It's hard working people like you who keep our world afloat. And it often goes unnoticed.
Kind of crazy that copper is nearly dead now. It is worth more to scrap all the copper and put a few fibers in place of a 1600 pair that can handle infinitely more data and pick up the same amount of customers with just a couple of pairs of fiber.
Did you ever have to pull something apart, fix it then patch it all up, only to then power it up and it didn't work? I hate that. What a nightmare.
I stayed at bed and breakfast down near Gig Harbor Washington, home to one of the most massive Naval bases on the US West coast.
We got inside, and the hostess were a homemaker and a man retired out of the navy.
While she was showing my wife the decorating, he took me downstairs to his man cave / bar for a drink.
On the bar was a weird item in a glass presentation case. He asked me to guess what it was and me knowing quite a bit about things immediately identified it as a section of an undersea Communications cable.
This man was the former commander of the nuclear submarine USS Flounder, in a secret Mission decades ago,his crew located on the sea floor, and removd a section of Russian undersea military communications cable and added a recording device and this was a section of that cable taken on that mission.
That was such an incredible saga. The process of setting up AND ESPECIALLY maintaining that cable tap.
@@hullinstruments I'd forgotten that part of the mission was to come back multiple times to get the recordings of what was communicated on the cable has no Bluetooth existed.
He said it was powered by a SNAP nuclear cell using PU 238, which was at that time, most of what existed in the US inventory at the time.
I too, have a piece of cable from that saga, and also the Korean sites. Our group had a special submersible, which was also used for such missions. Some of their stories were horrifingly blunt, and not for the weak of heart.
Yes.,.it was fascinating hearing those stories. I sat spellbound for a couple hours listening to a UA-cam discussion of that with interviews of you Navy guys.
My brother was a Navy lifer and I remember him hinting about secret submarine missions. I could only imagine such things 'till recently!
Hey, were those cable samples you guys have wire pairs or optical? It was a little while ago....
@brunonikodemski2420 My uncle and a cousin of his fought in Korea at Pusan reservoir. He told me captured Chinese soliders were killing POWs on orders from their commander. He was captured later in the day, and given a drumhead trial the next morning.
Granted I do mechanical/nuclear engineering but the engineering of communications cable never ceases to amaze me. Had a great Senior Staff I&C engineer teach me all about communications protocols, wiring, how to spec and use it, etc. It all makes the engineering of these undersea cables look like child's play.
Revives memories of how slow the internet was in the 90's because of the lack of undersea cables & the number of personal servers in UK dorm rooms instead of AWS virginia.
Dialup internet was soooo slow, and you can't use the internet and landline at the same time. "Bad" times.
Inb4 fiber optics provided cheaper materials with better transmission.
And there was also significantly less competition for those resources as well. No streaming, no online gaming etc etc etc
I used to repair the machinery that made those cables at Phelps-Dodge in Elizabethtown, Kentucky. 1980
Some of our were from New England Wire.
A good friend of mine, trained as ME, worked in BL served as Undersea Cable system engineer and dual-reporting to AT&T Undersea Cable business unit in late 80s and on, until sold to Tyco. He said shark bites were/are the common occurrence. We theorized that
- in electrical signal transmission, although at T3 speed, the pulses and harmonics emit RFI, electric shield (steel armor as emission shield) does not work too well.
- Since the new TAT-8 has just transitioned to optical fibers but the problem still did not go away, so the working theory is magnetism!
which 3LA puts out those "undisclosed functions"?
inb4 the answer is "yes."
Sea Water return!? That means intermediate nodes and end nodes need electrodes to the sea water, right? Sounds like a nightmare of rust/oxidation.
Seems like an ideal private industry/government "partnership." If you want a network of hydrophones on the sea bed to track.. aquatic activity.. they naturally need some data communications. And if the cable operator needs amplifiers ("easy") or repeaters (harder/more expensive) those would seem to be an ideal place for such a thing.
These days under the Atlantic, you can avoid needing any repeaters -- devices that recover bits and remodulate/retransmit them -- using low dispersion fiber and optical amplifiers. You can deploy an optical amplifier that will increase the signal level of all the wavelengths of light in a fiber used in a DWDM (dense wavelength division multiplexing system.) This is very powerful because it doesn't have to split out each wavelength, detect the signal, retransmit with a laser for each wavelength, and then recombine. The optical amplifier works on all the wavelengths "at once".
But this is where you need "low dispersion" fiber. Imagine that you transmit a single pulse of light (on a particular wavelength/color). As those photons propagate down the glass fiber, they don't all take exactly the same path through the glass. So that pulse of light will start to "spread out" as it travels through the fiber. And the problem is that it spreads out too far and smears into the previous and next pulse. Low dispersion fiber is carefully made using magic and physics and fancy manufacturing to keep the photons nudged closer to a single path down the middle of the fiber. The extreme version of this is "single-mode" vs. "multi-mode" fiber.
There is an amazing amount of engineering going on with these systems, and over the last decade or two, the systems are constructed to carry data as the first-class, primary customer, rather than synchronous TDM traffic of multiplexed phone calls. The hand-off to customers looks like an ethernet, and cable operators have much more flexible bandwidth allocation tools available that didn't exist in the past with SONET/SDH transport systems.
Hazardous environment justifies the investment of pre build maintenance facilities and repair possibilities thus IMHO never a super long cable without built-in pods.
BTW, between technology and political influence, one always wins.
Some of this is undoubtedly true. We had cables which did NOT have a steel cable wrapping, with very high voltages in them. The copper outer shell did not contain magnetic fields hardly at all, and mostly by eddy effects. Leakages were high. We did one job, where the strength members were all Kevlar or Aramid fiber. In that case it did not matter if anyone tapped it, since it was just going to an undersea oil drilling tooling fixture, and everyone knew what was going on.
I've been watching you for years and love the balance you strike between pure facts and good jokes. Thank you for injecting yourself and some lovely comedy into the content :)
heavy agree. I'm also glad he's gotten the recognition he always deserved
“Good jokes”
Wow, this brought back memories of the days I worked on the USNS Albert J Myer and USNS Zeus, both military submarine cable laying/repair ships.Thanks for the video
At the end of last year a gas line connecting Finland and Estonia and an undersea cable connecting Sweden and Estonia were damaged. It is indeed hard to protect these undersea assets and easy to deniably attack them.
Hmmmmm it has nothing to do with the reds?
If the cable is considered critical it is possible to trench and bury it some feet deep in the ocean (lake, seabed) bottom.
That is also very expensive. But, is done in certain cases.
Not to mention the gas line from the Russia to Germany that the United States didn’t cut even Biden said we would halt the exports
Perch-a…… like perch, the fish.
One of the most interesting aspects of this story, to me, is the lag between the first transatlantic telegraph cable, and the first tele-phone- cable, TAT-1, almost 100 years later!! And half a century after Marconi spanned the Atlantic with radio in 1906. You would think the transistor ultimately enabled it, and of course that had to wait until 1947. But they were new and un-tested. It was all done with tubes.
Bandwidth requirements for telegraph (binary Morse code) and telephone (voice) are RADICALLY different. The capacitance of the cable really affects that - and seawater is a wonderful dielectric (ie a cable under it creates a massive capacitor).
I'm at 4:13 of this video...interesting about the cladding, but a more interesting story is the "co-axial" cable that finally permitted rapid, relatively high bandwidth signaling over oceanic distances. We have the genius Oliver Heaviside to thank for the correct analysis of how to make the signal-carrying element high-bandwidth.
I work for Prysmian. Submarine cable has become one of the primary areas of business for the company and it is pretty cool. Check out their ship for laying submarine cable, the Leonardo da Vinci. It's nuts.
Prysmian recently finished their tower for manufacturing high voltage sea and underground cables here in Finland, Pikkala. I think that they’re only starting the production in 2025 though. I didn’t know that Prysmian had a ship like that, I couldn’t find any information on it by googling though.
@Simon_Denmark Yes, Pikkala is a very large plant for Prysmian. My current HR manager was in charge of HR over all of Finland, based out of Pikkala until she moved here to the US about 18 months ago. I apologize, I had the ship name incorrect, it is the Giulio Verne, but our big ship is the Leonardo da Vinci. It is a massive machine, but I heard that we just invested a half billion dollars to make an even bigger state of the art submarine cable laying ship. I'll edit my original comment and change the name of the ship. Prysmian seems to be taking over energy and electrification when it comes to cable production.
@@brandonmiles8174 Oh that’s cool, thanks for sharing. I definitely know Prysmian as an electrician and soon to be electrical engineer. I don’t work on the sea cabling or wind turbine side, more on the railway side.
As soon as I saw the title of this episode, it became a good day. I was grateful, because till then it had been a bad day, the kind of day that a man thinks back to as he drinks warm $4 sherry behind a Dennys, wondering if that day hadn't been so utterly atrocious, maybe he would be inside paying for fresh pie, instead of outside waiting for whatever is left in pie pans when the pie is gone, the kind of day only a grammatical nightmare of a run on sentence could do justice to. In a moment it changed, and a forlorn future disappeared in a puff of .........I dunno, ran out of drama gas.
I do really enjoy this topic, and I know Asianometry will do a great job of covering it. Not sure why I like it so much, but I am saving it for the mid shift grind. Thanks for making my day, hyperbole etc etc.
PBS American Experience did a wonderful video on the transatlantic cable and its a remarkable study in engineering and science. Many of the electrical units we use today were created to study the failure of the first cable (partially because of the enormous monetary loss that is was, and the need to understand what went wrong).
It should be noted that the cable in the thumbnail is a power cable, hence the three large copper conductors. Why three? Three phase power.
Some of these cables also carry fibre as a secondary use, which you may as well do if you’re laying the cable at all. I think the Tasmanian-Victorian undersea cable does both, and in fact I think it’s actually the cable pictured, but I can’t remember.
In any case, Tasmania imports a good amount of its power from Victoria (which sometimes in turn imports its power from other states) using this cable, and much of their internet traffic is routed through this cable too.
I am really loving the humor in your videos. I cracked up at "The guy she told you not to worry about"
I wonder what type of person laughs at cheater jokes
not the one being cheated on 😁
“SURE DOES!”
I love these little videos on things that don't need some sort of understanding of a technology like some of your more obscure electrical engineering videos do. Love your channel
Great video as always, but my ears bled a little each time he mis-pronounced "gutta-percha".
A while ago I read about the first transatlantic cable, about the size of a thumb in diameter, and the constant impedance mismatches as the cable played out and strength issues that snapped the cable. The cable was wrapped in....gutta percha. The book was: " Thread Across the Ocean: The Heroic Story of the Transatlantic Cable Paperback - Illustrated, July 1, 2003 by John Steele Gordon
It’s amazing how much we can send over a very small piece of glass.
The first undersea telegraph cables were in the 1850s - 1860s and the whole world was connected by about 1900. But all of those cables were just that, a big long wire, and enormous voltages were used to send messages very slowly. Telephone and high speed data needs amplifiers and electronics. That wouldn't happen until 1956 with TAT-1, which had miniature highly reliable vacuum tube amplifiers built into the cable, every hundred miles or so. Up to 36 simultaneous phone calls between Canada/US and the UK.
"This is as hard as you might think" - by crikey, I'm glad there's clever people in the world.
Merriam-Webster says gutta-percha is pronounced gut-uh perch-uh that is, the second word ends in cha, like in cha cha heels.
yes i cringed when he said perka
Galvanized steel with eco friendly wood veneers
Burying cables has its problems. If there is a failure of an amplifier, for example, you have to pull the cable to the surface to fix it. That is, once you actually FIND it and can actually get ahold of it. That means removing it from the trench. Once fixed, you have to put it back down. No small feat.
This video is extremely informative for understanding the development of submarine optical cables. As a manufacturer of these cables, I can confidently say that their production involves high complexity and stringent material requirements. Moreover, minimizing the costs associated with maintenance in the long run is crucial😂.
30 years ago I read Clarke’s book on World Communications - it was thought to be satellites but of course was cables!
You can buy a GPS unit accurate to about half a foot for under $1,000. Add a laptop with a map of all the undersea structure and fishing fleets would know where every hazard was located and when they are getting close. Adding bottom depth and navigation information might make this something they need to have onboard. It's possible they already have something onboard that only requires an up to date map.
great video as always. you mention at the beginning that the cables carry gigabits of data which is technically true, but we're in the terabit range now.
Dont forget that the USA has at least two dedicated submarines for tapping undersea cables for the NSA
Sharks find prey and other objects with an organ that can discern electric fields, organic or artificial. They are more than likely able to sense the cable's power output and was attracted to it thinking it might be prey.
I think most fish can do that.
@@douro20 the video highlighted sharks, raising the question of why these specific fish were biting buried cables.
@@thebeaconnetwork Sharks are a type of fish.
@@douro20 And the only fish mentioned in the video and shown disrupting an undersea cable..."most fish" aren't featured.
idt fiber optic cables carry electricity
I used to engineer the machines that put these cables there. Amazing job.
I also add polyethylene and steel tape layers to reduce chaffing
Fun fact, under sea communications disruptions were a huge concern for the allies (particularly the USA) in ww2. If disrupted, it meant that the US would have to rely on notoriously unreliable trans-atlantic radio to communicate. Not just that, but of course anyone can hear your transmission then.
Obviously this is still a huge concern today. Just, we've had a long time to think about it.
The knowledge gathered in this video is incredible.
Clearly and practically, I now know the peculiarities of submarine cables.
Very useful for me as I intend to explore this market.
Thanks
Thank you for this, I am always fascinatd by undersea cables.
Why don't the fisherman just trawl with the cables length instead across them? Most likely these fishermen don't even know the location of the cables until they get caught up on one. I just answered my own question.😂
In late 90s and early 2000s i worked for company that built under the ocean fiberoptic network. I was part of building of repeaters that were responsible for amplifing signal every 40 miles. Those cables had fiberoptics and power cables inside. Pretty cool technology
One of my favorite channels on UA-cam. I currently work in fiber optic network design. 🤙🏼
@15:24 redundancy is built into the system in the event of an outage.
Great quality as usual. Thank you
@@StoicGore This video is available for 2 months for Patreons. Im not patreon myself but you can sign in for free and see the release date of each video, and this one is dated 14 April. As a free lurker I cannot click to have further informations.
@@zeropolso then is he privating the videos and just sharing links to patrons? Seems like a stupid way to do it when you can just have members. Also shocking he gate keeps the videos for two months. Most youtubers do it for a week or two at most.
@@hotsauce2446 I don't know the how ( sharing link, membership.. ) and why ( stupidity, others.. ). I don't feel that concerned.
But I saw your feeling of mistrust, and I wanted to tell you that it was based on too little information. That's why I subscribed to the free access, and then saw the date of the post was 2 months old.
Besides, although we should expect to be disappointed often, not presupposing stupidity in others is a good habit to get into. I swear it could get you out of troubles most often than not, and you will be better prepared to cope any evil genius menacing your interests or abusing your confidence.
In the end, although I can't exclude the possibility of view purchases at 100%, the information (also reduced, i.e. the date of the post, the fact that the typical profile of the youtuber who buys views will also clickbait, whereas this is not the case here, and also the low number of these early comments, the fact that the user TheSeet3000 has had an account for 8 years, with playlists) makes me rather confident in the assertion that it is unlikely that these are paid comments.
I may be wrong and if more evidence are brought before me I'm ready to shift this assertion.
@@hotsauce2446 I answered but my answer is not displaying so I post again, sorry if this is a double post :
I dont know ( like you ) the how ( membership, private sharing... ) nor the why ( stupidity, other.. ), what I saw was your feeling of mistrust and that's why I took the asianometry free access and was able to confirm that the post was two months old like the comment. Because I think you felt it when you had too little information. It's still an accusation of dishonesty towards him, so it's not something to be thrown around lightly, is it?
Anyway, it's a good habit not to presuppose the stupidity of others. Both by not underestimating anyone who opposes you, by not hurting other people's feelings, by not missing a subtle message in the discussion, etc.
Finally, although I can't exclude the possibility of view purchases at 100%, the information (also limited, i.e. the date of the post, the fact that the typical profile of the youtuber who buys views will also do clickbait, whereas this is not the case here, the low number of these early comments, and the fact that the user TheSeet3000 has had an account for 8 years, with playlists) makes me rather confident in the assertion that it is unlikely that these are paid comments.
I could be wrong, and if new evidence is brought before me I may change my mind.
This is one of the best channels on UA-cam. Haven’t even watched this video yet but it’s surely excellent
Sharks also occasionally try to eat the Internet. Mainly because sharks hunt by electrolocation and cables look really fricken weird to them.
>Be shark
Use electric signals to hunt.
See giant electric signal
Bite.
There solved it for you.
It gets a bit technical but you might enjoy doing some reading on how we "light" these fibers- I'm thinking of submarine DWDM systems specifically but there's other technologies out there. It is tremendously cool stuff
Gutta-percha, you got the first bit right. But the second bit uses the ch sound used in perch.
Just last night I was reading Tom Standage’s “The Victorian Internet” which discussed the first attempts at laying undersea cables.
Also check out a 1996 article in Wired magazine about these cables, by Neal Stephenson, the sci-fi author. Sadly, pay-walled.
@@jxh02 That was such a good article that I kept the physical magazine just for it. It's still in my tech library to this day. Just Brilliant!
There is a huge amount of sabotage on opposing efforts. Once somebody went and drove a steel needle into one
Was going to mention this book too, it's a good read. That section on those first attempts was pretty hilarious
I've always been interested in this This was a very good video
I met a tube collector that had a very old tube that was used in underseas cables. Amazing he had it and is tube collection was huge and he is a great guy to chat with about tubes.
At 3:57 LW cable is used in the deep water sections 6,000m to 2,000m because it is not worried about sharks, anchors or fishing activity.
Another kind of cable is high voltage DC cable, or HVDC. They are used to provide electricity power to islands, but in more recent times, they are being used for wind farms.
Get your ass down to William Brooke O'Shack Henessyes office and tell him exactly what you did!!!!
Maybe the cables should resemble more how the rest of the internet works: a net where some cut strings don't matter. Instead of laying a long line with periodic repeaters, maybe it would be a good idea to lay a net, same distance between repeaters, but the repeaters are also routers able to switch direction of the signal. Also, they are crossings with multiple connected cables (maybe 6 per crossing, making a 60° equidistant triangle mesh). Making the routers plug-and-play with the cables could also vastly reduce the cost of replacing a broken section.
Or I have overlooked some reason that is not viable, who knows...
I could give proposals for a 'defended cable strategy' since it appears that there is a need for them. First you need a 'net' like cable that has very large holes, and to do the defending we use drones. Lots, and lots of drones. Cut a cable and the drones swarm from their solar powered platforms, some explosions, threat neutralized. Drones replenish by hopping one platform over all at once and we fill in from the shore.
In reference to that end note, you would be shocked how much of the world's infrastructure is largely unprotected, relying on people to have good intentions to function. Sure, there is built-in redundancies, but in the end, we just hope no one messes with the stuff when it is fairly trivial to do so. The power grid is another such example and every year, in the US alone, there are attacks on it. Thankfully, there are, again, redundancies.
Rattan as insulation for wire kinda blows my mind
Power Feeding of repeaters on long fibre cable runs is interesting topic.
Can't believe they use soo much copper when glass fibre is way better.
Luck Legs II is a great name for a tank.
Indemnity is not compensation, it's unaccountability so it "claims" itself.
With such an array of things that can go awry it is truly amazing any online messages get's thr...
The meth in Vietnam must be pretty good if people are going to start stealing copper from undersea cables.
They seem extremely vulnerable to sabotage. I guess the depth does make them quite safe from that though since the average person or even insurgent group probably doesn't have access to deep sea submersibles they could use to get down there to cut them.
So excited to watch because this seems like an Asianometry video that I will actually be able to comprehend and understand!!
Of course sharks will bite cables. They're basically the puppy of the seas.
Only thing is I believe the thumb nail image is of a power carrying submarine cable. Note three conductors. This video is about data carrying cables
Ironically, undersea fiber is more vulnerable to large electromagnetic events (think CME or solar flares) than other kinds of cables. Because of length, conductivity, and the repeaters. The longer the cable, the more sensitive it is (think of the steel and conductive power cabling between repeaters as giant antennas).
"The guy she told you not to worry about" ?!?!?! JON ! THAT WAS GREAT ! 😂😮😂😮😂😮😂😮😂😮 KKEP UP THE EXCELLENT WORK AND MAY GOD BLESS YOU ALWAYS !
Humans: invent cables
Cats and sharks: is it for me ? 👉👈
Irish built New York, San Fran Cisco tram, the first submarine, many first inventions in medical tech and vaccines and now this. My fellow Irish men and women are something else altogether. 😄🇮🇪
Thanks for this video, am currently planning laying 1000km undersea cables for a fun side project this weekend
Every process looks expensive af
As far as sharks biting the undersea cables goes, perhaps the sharks are detecting small electric currents from the cables. Sharks have organs adapted to detect small electric currents in the water which are made by the muscles of animals in the water, so if the sharks detect the electric currents from these undersea cables, they might mistake them for potential prey.
If I remember correctly the British dragged up a German cable to the US the day after the outbreak of WW1 and cut it.
When I saw this video in my notifications I was talking to my hubby. I ended my sentence saying (in a playful way) "...and shut up. A new Asianometry just dropped." Then I played your video.
@asianometry you should have looked in to the cable repair process, it's pretty interesting to fish up broken cables and repairing them.
I think it's funny how much modern global internet and communications depend on these undersea cables, yet, at least in my experience, many people don't even or barely know they even exist, let alone how important they are. Thank you for another informative video! I look forward to the next one!
God be with you out there, everybody. ✝️ :)
An undersea repeater is definitively something I want to take apart, but it seems they are not common to find in "for parts or repair" condition and price on eBay 🤔
The dry humor here is impressive. Love this
i was like what on earth is gutter perka and realised it is "Getah perca" lol
I have some root canals filled with getah perca.
who is "the guy that she told you not to worry about"?.... I've had one or two of those. I was told they were married and had kids and I was being paranoid. the first time I was right and got a divorce. the second time I knew I was right, but decided to live in ignorance. I dont know whats worse.
I love your style - 100% info 0% filler
Too many creators weigh their videos those with too much comedic elemants to the point they might as well produce a comedy show. So thx ^^
I think you should fhave mentioned undersea ploughing. An accepted method of protection for the early FO TAT systems designed by STC.
Funny how im genuinely excited to watch this video about underwater sea cables.
When i saw the in&out 4x4 i left to get one, sorry if i miss the rest of your vid bro.
One of the theories as to why sharks bite fiber optic cables is that the nonlinear optics in the repeaters require a power source, so the cable carries both fiber optic and copper for electric power. Sharks are sensitive to electric fields and mistake the cable as prey.
Did you get a new mic? Sounds good!! Also, cable tech is super cool, thank you for the upload.
Sharks use a form of electrosensory from their snouts. They use it to find close prey since their eyes are typically on the side of their head. They cant actually see what they are biting oftimes so they use the electric sensory in their noses. The sharks are probably thinking its food and taking a nibble or the current simulates a prey item. :)
13:50 *”Soft caly”*
1 entire chapter in a neal stephenson novel be like:
Always wanted to start collecting cross section specimens for various under sea cables. Would look so good with my semiconductor/test gear collections!
There are also documented "russian special cables operations", to tap and place listening devices on the cables which frequently resulting in damaging or even accidentally cutting the cables by the sub.
Last teadlast year autumn russia also destroyed cables under the Baltic Sea between Estonia and Sweden and also power cables between Finland and Estonia.
You know those movies where animals are the protagonists, like War Horse (2011) or Weiner Dog (2016)? A movie about a whale or shark encountering an undersea cable would be an interesting addition to that genre.
This is weird. I didn't detect a single transistor in this video :O
The things that man does can be pretty impressive.
*im a thick under sea cable layer and I work for months at a time and I have some suspicions on my wife when I'm away....