Modern cables - an update

The story of Commercial Cable's transatlantic telegraph cable venture, which started in 1884 and dissolved in 1962, was neatly rounded off by the news in 1986 that the same coastline in England (not more than 10 miles from Weston front) was to be involved with the first commercial transatlantic fibre-optic cable. This also goes via Ireland and lands in New York. In Ireland the landing is now Ballinspittle (of relatively recent "moving statues" fame). This cable is still in use, as far as I can gather, but is now regarded as one of the relative slow-coaches of the Internet age at 420 Mb/s (about a million times the speed of the old telegraph cables). (This may have been upgraded to a slightly faster speed since laying.) There are newer cables landing at Brean as well with speeds in the Tb range. T means "tera" for a million million times - so speeds are now an English Billion times faster (1000 American Billions).

You may well be viewing this site via a trunk route not far from the location of the author and the British landing of the historical cables described.

This link is important to the resources of West Cork[W].

Newspaper report about the Brean cable