Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

The era of subsea fibre optic technology began with a very simple, elegant approach. In the digital world we rely on binary code as the language for networks, computer processing, and storage. One advantage of the binary format is that any data can be represented by only two symbols, zero and one. This means faster and cheaper processing since there are only two fundamental building blocks to which technology must develop physical counterparts. Binary makes this particularly easy. The absence of  an electric charge, magnetic orientation or pulse of light is interpreted as a zero. Their presence is interpreted as a one. This simple schema leads to relatively infrequent errors or mistakes. And just as importantly, errors are easily detected and fixed. In contrast, an analog system relies on a continuous range of values and hence can have many fundamental building blocks. While this might seem more efficient due to the infinite richness of potential values rather than relying on longer st