Dexterous robots toil at the bottom of the sea to safeguard the web
Today, 95 percent of international communications traffic flows through submarine cables laid on the ocean floor. Yet many people still think the internet is beamed around the world by satellites. A submarine cable may not be much to look at, but flashing through the eight fibre-optic lines bundled together inside its narrow confines, each just the width of a single human hair, is enough bandwidth for 20 million people. Every second, 3.2 terabits of data can fire down the cable, each single piece taking 0.00072 seconds to complete the 12,200 km return journey from the UK to the US.
The worldwide web is dependent on a fragile network of subsea fibre optic cables, but who looks after these cables when they break, and how do they do it?
Our company, Global Marine Systems, is involved in installing and repairing these subsea cables, which are the unseen backbone of modern communications, unknown to many end users, but which the internet is so dependent on. We’re a British company working with every major telco in the world to protect, repair and restore subsea cables. As the world’s largest installer of subsea cables, we’ve been involved in installing over a third of the world’s subsea telecommunications cables over our 160 year history.
