Hello everyone and welcome to ZD Tech, ZDNet’s daily editorial podcast. My name is Pierre Benhamou and today I invite you on a journey through the history of telecommunications discovering the first submarine cable linking Europe to America. A story in which you will see, France played a leading role.
With Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN) and Orange Marine, France can now pride itself on having in its ranks two flagships of the fiber optic submarine cable industry, these backbones supporting the global Internet from the seabed. .
And if France is today a destination of choice for international cable networks, the love story between France and these submarine cables is not new, as you will see. The idyll actually dates back to the second half of the 19e century.
After a first successful attempt at a transatlantic link in 1869, the Compagnie française du Télégraphe de Paris à New York was founded 10 years later with the aim of laying a blue-white-red cable between the New and the Old Continent. Designed under the aegis of a subsidiary of the German company Siemens and laid in 1879 by the ship Faraday, the first cable ship in history, the cable connects Deolen (10 kilometers from Brest) to Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon to end up in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
99% of global data exchange
In 1897, a third French transatlantic cable, baptized Le Direct, will link France to the United States non-stop. Manufactured and laid by the Société Industrielle des Telephones, it will be, with its 3,173 nautical miles, the longest single-span cable laid to date. Now considered a symbol of the history of telecommunications, it will be operated until 1940 and the German invasion of France, before being put back into service in 1952 and finally closed in November 1959.
If the submarine cables originally had a tiny data transfer capacity, this is no longer the case today. The backbones of the global Internet do not bear this name for nothing, since they currently support 99% of global data exchanges and are as such largely preempted by the GAFAM, at the forefront in this field.
As for France, it still takes advantage of its advantageous geography to remain the preferred gateway for submarine cables on the Old Continent. This is evidenced by the recent or future landfalls of various international networks led by well-known digital giants such as Facebook and Google.