UNIVERSITY OF ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY

TAXILA
Optical Fiber Communication

SUBMITTED TO: Sir Ali Waqar

SUBMITTED BY: Ifra Waqas (19-TE-98)

ASSIGNMENT NO: 01

QUESTION NO.1: Explain what transatlantic communication cable is in detail.

An undersea cable, also called marine cable or transatlantic telecommunications cable is a

submarine communications cable connecting one side of the Atlantic Ocean to the other. Each cable
was a single wire in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Coaxial cable with amplifiers started to be
used after the turn of the century. Because of their vast distances range and the usage of optical
amplifiers, all cables installed towards the end of the 20th century used optical fiber.

The original transatlantic cable was a simple telegraph cable but laying it across the ocean floor was
an immense undertaking. In 1854, entrepreneur Cyrus Field secured a charter for the earliest
transatlantic cable. Laying it took four attempts and the help of the U.S. and British navies; efforts
lasted between 1857 and 1858, but the cable failed in just a few months. After the cable stopped
working, it would take another eight years before the countries laid a working transatlantic cable
that provided reliable communication across the Atlantic Ocean.

By 1866, Field had successfully installed the first long-term transatlantic telegraph cable, which more
than a century later resulted as the first fiber-optic cable to span the Atlantic, more commonly called
"the transatlantic cable" now. This later cable, a "light pipe" using advanced laser technology,
represented a quantum leap in speed over the copper cables used for domestic telephones and early
data lines.

QUESTION NO 02: Explain the commercial implementation of transatlantic communication cable

i.e. TAT-9 and TAT-14 in detail.

TAT-9:
The first transatlantic submarine cable system, TAT-1, went into service on 25 September 1956.
From then on, there have been the TAT series of transatlantic submarine cable systems, until the
latest one TAT-14.

The TAT-8 was the first transatlantic fiber-optic submarine cable, constructed in 1988, connecting
the United States, the United Kingdom and France. It was a massive feat of engineering involving
more than 3,000 miles (about 4828.03 km) of cable. A joint venture that included AT&T, France
Télécom, and British Telecom, it was intended to unite the phone and data networks of these three
countries. TAT-8 cable system contained two working fiber pairs and one fiber pair reserved as a
spare. The signal on each optical fiber was modulated at 295.6 Mbit/s (carrying 20 Mbit/s of traffic).

Currently, most of the TAT series of submarine cable systems have been out of service, except for
the TAT-14.

Originally, submarine cables were simple point-to-point connections but with the development of
submarine branching units (SBUs), more than one destination could be served by a single cable
system. Modern cable systems now usually have their fibers arranged in a self-healing ring to
increase their redundancy, with the submarine sections following different paths on the ocean floor.
As of 2012, operators had “successfully demonstrated long-term, error-free transmission at 100
Gbps across Atlantic Ocean” routes of up to 6000 km, meaning a typical cable can move tens of
terabits per second overseas. Speeds improved rapidly in the last few years, with 40 Gbit/s having
been offered on that route only three years earlier in August 2009.

TAT-9:
TAT-9 was the 9th transatlantic telephone cable system, in operation from 1992 to 2004, operating
at 560Mbit/s (80,000 telephone circuits) between Europe (Goon Hilly, United Kingdom; Saint-Hilaire-
de-Riez, France; Conil de la Frontera, Spain) and North America (Manahawkin, United States;
Pennant Point, Nova Scotia, Canada).[1] It was built by an international consortium of co-owners and
suppliers. Co-owners included AT&T Corporation, British Telecom and France Telecom.

TAT-9 was the first fiber optic system to operate at 565 Mbit/s, twice the speed of the first
transatlantic fiber optic system, TAT-8. It was also the first system to have the ability to switch traffic
on demand between the five landing points: Canada, the United States, France, Spain and the United
Kingdom. This enabled the smaller countries in the network to afford their own landing points, and
also allowed the network to accommodate for large changes in traffic demands at any individual
station, such as the dramatic increase during the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona.

The first-ever fiber optic switching devices that allowed for switching were called Undersea
Branching Multiplexers (UBMs).

TAT-14:
TAT-14 is a 15,428 km transatlantic submarine cable system, connecting the United States to the
United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark. The TAT-14 cable system was
ready for service on March 21, 2001 and retired on December 15, 2020.

The TAT-14 consortium comprises 11 carriers, namely, AT&T, BT, C&W, Deutsche Telekom, France
Telecom, KPN, MCII, PGE, Sprint, Swisscom and Telia.

The TAT-14 cable lands at:

 Manasquan, New Jersey, USA

 Tuckerton, NJ, USA
 Wide mouth, UK
 St. Valery-en-Caux, France
 Katwijk, Netherlands
  Norden, Germany
 Blaabjerg, Denmark

Designed with a partial SDH ring protection network structure, the TAT-14 cable system has an initial
system capacity of 1.87Tbs calculated as:

Southern route: 41 x 10Gbs channels + 640 Gbs SDH capacity

Northern route: 18 x 10Gbs channels + 640 Gbs SDH capacity

Total = 1.87 Tbs

Now, TAT-14 has a total design capacity of 9.38Tbps upon upgrade with new technology.

On December 15, 2020, the TAT-14 consortium decommissioned the TAT-14 cable system, making its
lifetime of 19 years and 9 months. The TAT-14 is the first trans-atlantic cable to be decommissioned
since the Gemini cable in 2003.

In April 2021, Subsea Environmental Services and Red Penguin Associates (advisors) were awarded
the contract to decommission the TAT-14 telecommunications cable system, to remove and recycle
of shore-ends in the US, UK, France, Denmark and the Netherlands as well as the deep-water
segments in the North Atlantic.