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From: johnl@esegue.segue.boston.ma.us (John R. Levine)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Name That Undersea Cable
Message-ID: <4615@accuvax.nwu.edu>
Date: 1 Mar 90 07:05:14 GMT
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X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 10, Issue 137, Message 1 of 11


I have a beach house in Harvey Cedars NJ, a small town on a barrier
island about 30 miles north of Atlantic City.  Two blocks south of my
house, at each end of the street (east and west ends, that is) there
are large AT&T signs warning us that there is a buried transcontinental 
cable and awful things will happen to anyone who digs without talking
to them first.  Since the only thing to the east is the ocean, I
presume this is one of the transatlantic cables.  Anybody have an idea
which one?  It's not TAT-8, that leaves from Tuckerton which is about
10 miles south.  The mainland town across from us where the cable
makes landfall is Barnegat, if that's any help.  There's an old VLF
antenna array nearby.

Speaking of TAT-8, there's an article in the current Data
Communications describing all of the trouble they're having with it.
TAT-8 is the first fiber-optic transoceanic cable.  When they were
doing the trials, they had incredible shark problems, for some reason
sharks found fiber cable delicious.  Perhaps they used it as dental
floss.  They finally fixed that by wrapping it in something that
tastes awful, and laid the thing all the way across the ocean.  The
western end, as noted above, is in Tuckerton, the eastern end forks
underwater and goes to Penmarch, France and Widemouth, England.

The problem is that the French branch for some reason keeps being
accidentally cut by fishing trawlers.  Evidently it's not buried as
well as it should be.  There are 108 repeaters every 70 km powered by
a 7 KV circuit.  Unfortunately, anytime they do any work on the cable,
they have to power down the whole thing to avoid electrocuting the
repairmen, which means that each time they fish up and fix the French
branch, the undamaged English branch is turned off, and the repair
process takes several days.  Backup satellite circuits are offered,
but customers are not pleased.


Regards,
John Levine, johnl@esegue.segue.boston.ma.us, {spdcc|ima|lotus}!esegue!johnl