Subsea Environmental Services is currently hauling TAT-8, the first fiber-optic cable ever laid across the Atlantic Ocean, off the seabed near Portugal, according to a WIRED feature published this week. Built by AT&T, British Telecom, and France Telecom, the cable entered service on December 14, 1988, and was taken out of operation in 2002 after developing a fault too expensive to repair. It has sat on the ocean floor for more than two decades.
TAT-8 — short for Trans-Atlantic Telephone 8 — was the eighth transoceanic cable system across the Atlantic, but the first to transmit traffic using optical fibers rather than copper. Its capacity was exhausted within 18 months of launch, which effectively proved the model for every major undersea cable that followed. By 2001, the TAT series had reached number 14. At its launch, science fiction writer Isaac Asimov addressed audiences in Paris and London via video link from New York, calling it "this maiden voyage across the sea on a beam of light."
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The Bell Labs facility in Holmdel, New Jersey, where the underlying technology was developed and tested, is now a mixed-use complex called Bell Works. It’s perhaps better known today as the filming location for Lumon Industries' headquarters in the Apple TV+ series Severance. During renovation, workers found 18 kilometers of early TAT-8 sea trial cable in the basement.
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