Say Goodbye to the Undersea Cable That Made the Global Internet Possible

The first fiber-optic cable ever laid across an ocean — TAT-8, a nearly 6,000-kilometer line between the United States, United Kingdom, and France that carried its first traffic on December 14, 1988 — is now being pulled off the Atlantic seabed after more than two decades of sitting dormant, bound for recycling in South Africa.

Subsea Environmental Services, one of only three companies in the world whose entire business is cable recovery and recycling, began the operation last year using its new diesel-electric vessel, the MV Maasvliet, and had already brought 1,012 kilometers of the cable to the Portuguese port of Leixoes by August.

TAT-8, short for Trans-Atlantic Telephone 8, was built by AT&T, British Telecom, and France Telecom, and hit full capacity within just 18 months of going live. A fault too expensive to repair took it out of service in 2002. The recovered cable is being shipped to Mertech Marine in South Africa, where it will be broken down into steel, copper, and two types of polyethylene — all commercially valuable, especially the high-quality copper at a time when the International Energy Agency projects global shortages within a decade.