Just saw [this post](https://www.instagram.com/reel/CrivNA3LNel/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=) and I know it’s a very oversimplification, but what are these cables and what do they exactly do ? And who repairs, manages these cables.
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Well the original transoceanic telegraph cables were laid by the telegraph companies. Then later the phone companies. These used good old fashioned copper wires (originally just one or two) in a LOT of shielding, and then later simple repeaters or amplifiers (and the power to drive those).
Later on the cables switched from using copper conductors to fiber optic cables – the nice thing about fibre is you can shove multiple different color wavelengths of light down the same cable, so you can “multiplex” hundreds of different signals simultaneously. And with the right electronics to encode/decode and multiplex these light signals _very fast_ you get a single fiber optic strand carrying tens of gigabits per second of data. Now run _multiple_ fiber optic strands in the same cable == lots of bits / second.
Who runs and maintains them? The equipment, ships and personnel to make and lay and splice these cables across the ocean are ridiculously expensive – so there are only a few companies who specialize in doing this. These companies are contracted by the companies who want (and are willing to pay for) the cables. THOSE companies might be telco’s or governments or a consortium of telcos willing to “split” the cost. Big data companies too – Google is laying cables now.
But, to over simplify, you want a data cable from New York to Paris (or the closest beaches to)? You go to the cable making co and the switching gear maker and say “I want x channels over y fibres at z data rate” and they tell you what equipment they can make and what the cable will look like (how thick, how much can it bend, how frequent the repeaters have to be, what the max length of spool they can make – you can’t get a cable to go all the way, they have to make several and splice them together). Then you go to your cable laying company, give deets on the cable and they say yay or nay. Then you go and buy your landing points – literally where the cable comes ashore and connects to ground infrastructure. There’s gonna be a shack or a bunker with gear etc. and all the interconnects with your land infrastructure.
Then you fork over gobs of money, all the stuff gets made, the ship rolls up the spools of cable and they start at one side and start laying cable, splicing the segments together.
edit: then, once your cable is connected up how do you make money on it (unless you’re going to utilize all of its bandwidth yourself, like Google)? Well, you connect up your cable ends with switches and routers that connect to other lines for various other big telcos and you start charging them for bandwidth – you just saved them the $hassle$ of laying or contracting their own cable to get more bandwidth from A to B – they run a line to your ocean cable terminus, hook up the gear and you charge them by the Terrabyte. Or whatever, $10M/month.
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