Pictured: Britains Most Powerful Internet Connection
Pictured here is the newest high tech cable that carries internet traffic between Britain and New York being laid at a secret location on the south coast of England.
Most people think the internet is beamed around the planet by satellites. In fact, 90 per cent of global internet traffic is carried by a vast cable network, thousands of miles of which snake under the oceans.
The two busiest internet hubs are New York and London, and nine cables link them. But the one pictured here is the Atlantic’s newest and most advanced submarine cable system and is so powerful that it could carry the entire internet content in both directions even if the other eight lines failed simultaneously.
The super-high-speed cable stretches 3,800 miles along the seabed from New York and is then buried six feet under the sand when it reaches land at this north Cornish beach.
The precise location is secret for fear of terrorist sabotage, and until recently these pictures have never been published before. The Daily Mail was granted permission once all interested parties agreed the beach is unidentifiable.
Having made its way under the beach, the cable snakes through the hills behind to emerge through a nondescript hole beneath the floor of a surgically clean control room in an anonymous facility several miles away.
The actual cable itself isn’t much wider than a garden hose. But flashing through the eight fibre-optic lines bundled inside its narrow confines is enough bandwidth for 20 million people.
Every second, 3.2 terabits of data can fire down the cable, each single piece taking 0.00072 seconds to complete the 7,600-mile return journey from here to the US.
Apollo’s speed is courtesy of ultra high powered lasers, one in the UK, the other in New York, that blast the signal down the fibre-optic lines.
As no light source is powerful enough to retain its intensity over such vast distances, electrical repeaters costing £1 million each – and fed by a 10,000-volt current that runs through the cable itself – are attached at 30-mile intervals to amplify the signal.
Although there have been undersea cables connecting Britain and the US since the late 19th century, until 1956 these could only handle Morse code.
Data capacity of a single cable has increased 80,000 times in just 20 years. When the first fibre-optic system went live in 1988 a single cable could carry 2,500 calls at once.
In the mid-Nineties, with the introduction of optical amplifiers that boosted laser signals, the capacity on a single cable rose to the equivalent of 60 million phone calls. Apollo’s cable can transfer data equivalent to 200 million phone calls.
So next time you take the kids to the beach just don’t dig too deep or you might wipe out my internet connection. 
Posted on November 19, 2009 | Filed Under Tech
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