“ The first thing that phone will do is try and get that photograph back to the home data centre where your Apple or Android service is hosted . So what ' s driving this uplift in capacity and networking requirements is the machine to machine interaction that is mirroring data and moving that data around .”
Cable versus satellites You may ask what are the advantages of cables over satellites ? With more than 1,300 communication satellites orbiting the Earth today and Elon Musk ’ s high-profile SpaceX attempting to monopolise this market with Starlink , you may be surprised to read that 98 % of all data in our daily communications is carried by cables under the sea . There are more than 400 operational submarine cables today – stretching over 1.3million km .
According to Aqua Comms the reason is simple : submarine cables transmit substantially more data than satellites at far lower cost .
“ Using radio waves to a satellite will be 100ths to a 10th of the capacity of the sort of similar thing in the fibre optics . So what Musk is doing is creating a mesh and yes , the satellites all talk to each other , but the pure volume of data that you can shift is minuscule and only people who don ’ t live at the end of a cable – such as those in more remote parts of the world – may decide to use satellites to maintain connectivity .”
Reflecting on how advanced optical electronics has advanced during his career , Bayliff commented : “ Innovation has come a long way . Optical fibre transmission is essentially flashing a light at one end of a big glass tube and seeing it at the other end . But the chemistry that ' s gone into making glass is so pure today it means you don ' t lose that light across our 5,536km fibre optic cable which spans the Atlantic . That is quite amazing !”
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