Introduction to an Article Originally Published on TMCNet.com – April 13, 2009

April 13, 2009

 Looking Back to Look Forward: 150 Years of Transatlantic Communications

 By TMCnet Special Guest
Jaymie Scotto and Ilissa Miller , Jaymie Scotto & Associates

It’s amazing to consider all the technological innovation within a relatively short amount of time, and the resulting impact on our lives from this technology. It was only 150 years ago since the first Atlantic submarine cable was completed, connecting Trinity Bay via Newfoundland to Valentia Island in Ireland. Although the subsea cable laying is still an arduous, expensive and sometimes dangerous task as it was then, the key differences in today’s cable is the quality and the sheer quantity of information that can be sent through links underwater. 

In August of 1858, the first transatlantic message was sent over the new link from Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom to the United States President James Buchanan, the 15th President of the United States, who served right before President Abraham Lincoln. The message was 99 words and took 12 hours to send. The cable that carried this message sent only 400 messages before it began to fail, just 23 days after it initially went live. Today, Hibernia Atlantic (News – Alert), a privately held Trans-Atlantic submarine cable network that provides “Security through Diversity” to European and U.S. customers, can send the entire Library of Congress in only 63 milliseconds over one of their fiber optic submarine cable links and can carry 30 million simultaneous phone calls at a single time. This is modern fiber optic cable system at its best. But modern cables haven’t always linked the continents. The history of the first cable is a fascinating story, almost forgotten if it wasn’t for companies like Hibernia Atlantic that routes its network within the history of the industry. 

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