The super highway underneath the sea

Instead of floating in space, much of the information super highway is actually under water, where it runs the risk of being savaged by sharks.

You might be surprised to know that this global communications system surfaces near a small village on the Yorkshire coast.

If Tata Communications’ Hunmanby Cable Station didn’t exist, our internet traffic could move at snail’s pace.

There are a lot of myths surrounding the development of communication systems that have revolutionised the way we work and play.

If you think the internet is largely dependent on satellites circling thousands of miles above the earth, think again.

The global communications system relies on old submarine cable routes that date from the 1800s.

Two hundred and fifty submarine cable systems provide the backbone for most of today’s communications systems.

Another 19 are due to come online this year.

Less than five per cent of our hi-tech communications network is done via satellite, with fibre accounting for most of the rest.

Modern submarine cables are able to transmit more than 8,4000,000,000 words per second, which is the equivalent of 150,000 copies of War & Peace.

The cables can also carry more than 50m simultaneous phone calls, without a single crossed line.

The 19th century version of the information super highway would have struggled to keep up with a packhorse.

The first transatlantic cable transmission in 1858 was a 98-word message from Queen Victoria to President Buchanan of the US which took 16 hours to transmit.

You can almost picture Mr Buchanan drumming his fingers to the bone, while affairs of state were placed on hold.

Fifteen years later, the first commercial transatlantic cable message was sent.

It cost the princely sum of £20 for 20 words, which is roughly the equivalent of £900 today.

By 1870, information could be transmitted at around 10 words per minute.

Fans of Tolstoy should note that it would have taken 37 days to send over one copy of War & Peace.

Today, of-course information moves at lightning pace. Messages can be sent with the click of a mouse.

But could a shark bring our internet connection to a sudden halt?

A spokesman for telecoms giant Cable & Wireless said that this was, thankfully, a rare event.

Many of the submarine cables were originally laid by companies which are part of the Cable & Wireless family tree.

Stuart Sutton, the chief technology officer at Cable & Wireless Worldwide, said: “The early submarine cable systems pioneered telecommunications across the world’s oceans.

“Today, the modern submarine systems continue to deliver the vast majority of traffic around the globe for consumers and businesses as demand for bandwidth hungry devices and services, such as smartphones, tablets and video streaming accelerates.”

Which brings us to the Yorkshire connection. The Hunmanby Cable Station in North Yorkshire could hire more staff as demand for high speed communication services increases.

It was set up in 2001 as a submarine cable landing station, and, although it only employs two permanent staff, it is a key staging post on the super highway.

Speaking exclusively to the Yorkshire Post, Claude Sassoulas, the managing director for Europe and Africa for Tata Communication, said: “The site’s importance has grown over the past years and we currently have close to 4m megabits of data, internet and telephony traffic transiting via Hunmanby. He added: “The super highway that we operate has three routes into the UK - in Highbridge in Somerset, one across the Channel and one into Hunmanby.

“Tata Communications carries 15 per cent of the global internet traffic and is a provider of high speed internet access to a large number of operators, including fixed and mobile, and service providers. Hunmanby is a key hub of our super highway into the UK.

“Based on business growth and customer requirements, the site has the potential to grow and more staff would then be needed.”

If it continues to expand, there could be more jobs on offer for telecoms and engineering workers on Yorkshire’s coast.

The importance of submarine cables has been underlined by a report compiled by the United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre, or UNEP, for short.

In the foreword to the report, the authors, Ibrahim Thiaw, Jon Hutton and Mick Green state: “Today more than a million kilometres of state-of-the-art submarine fibre optic cables span the oceans, connecting continents, islands and countries around the world.

“Arguably, the international submarine cable network provides one of the most important infrastructural foundations for the development of whole societies and nations within a truly global economy.

“At the beginning of the submarine cable era, there was a widely held belief that the riches of the ocean were too vast ever to be affected by humans..Today, the situation is vastly different. Human activities, directly or indirectly, have affected and altered all environments world-wide, including the 71 per cent of the planet that is ocean.”

In recent years, governments have started to realise that there is a need for “wise preservation and protection” of the oceans, the report states.

The UNEP report concludes that cable companies and mariners are working together to reduce cable damage.

Based on records spanning several decades, it is estimated that there are between 100 and 150 cable faults around the world each year.

Nearly half of these faults are due to fishing, although earthquakes can also cause damage and disruption.

Some things haven’t changed in the last 150 years.

The method of recovering faulty cables has remained the same.

They are retrieved using a grappling hook on the end of up to five miles of rope. The rope is more expensive than the cables it helps to recover.

So the next time you log on, pray that a shark with a power complex isn’t nibbling away at a cable in the deep.

Communications and cables

Cable & Wireless Worldwide’s submarine network stretches around 500,000km, which is greater than the distance between the Earth and the Moon.

The company can trace its history back to a number of British telegraph companies founded by Sir John Pender in the 1860s. In 1866, a Pender-led consortium laid the first submarine cable across the Atlantic using the Great Eastern.

The Great Eastern also laid a cable from India to England in 1870.