Cuba and Venezuela pushing ahead with major undersea project

Work on an underwater cable that will link Cuba, Venezuela and Jamaica is underway with the survey ship RV Ridley Thomas mapping the ocean floor between the countries to determine the exact path of the cable.

The underwater sea cable, or submarine cable, is intended to develop the online capacity of Cuba by increasing the country’s internet speed by a factor of 3000, according to Cuba news reports and indications from government.

Once the mapping of the ocean floor is complete, construction will begin, with an eventual completion date set for late 2011, Alberto Rodríguez, Vice Minister of Computing and Communications, told Cuban news media.

The project will be operated by Telecommunications Gran Caribe SA, a joint venture of the Cuban and Venezuelan governments and will cost around US$70 million, but the economic and social benefits of the new submarine cable will be far greater due to the improved access to online resources, as well as the cross-social and national exchanges that the submarine cable will engender.

In addition to Internet access, of which only 2.9% of Cubans currently enjoy, the cable will also enhance the speed of all transfers (audio, visual, information etc) and will better connect the countries involved. The cable, which will stretch over 5000 kilometres, will have a lifespan of 25 years, after which it will need to be replaced.

The cable’s land connections are in Caracas, Venezuela near Maiquetía airport and Santiago de Cuba on Siboney beach. Due to the complexity and specialised nature of the infrastructure project, the joint telecommunications venture decided to bring in foreign specialists to install the cable.

Alcatel Shanghai Bell, which is itself a Chinese joint venture with Paris-based Alcatel-Lucent, will install the cable on behalf of the Cuban and Venezuelan governments over the coming months.

Once the Cuba-Venezuela portion of the project is complete, a second link will be developed between Santiago de Cuba and Jamaica, although the land-connection point has not yet been decided. This part of the cable will be just 200 kilometres in length.

Submarine cables have become an increasingly common form of complex data exchange between nations that share close political, cultural and economic ties, due to their economic feasibility and efficiency. The world’s first commercial submarine cable to provide constant communication between two countries was the Anglo-French Telegraph Company’s cable across the English Channel in 1850, with a more advanced version in 1851.

The following year, another cable linked London directly to Paris and England was linked to Ireland. The most famous early submarine cable is of course the Trans-Atlantic telegraph cable. It was first laid in 1858, but proved unsuccessful and inefficient and it was not until 1866 that Isambard Kingdom Brunel's ship the SS Great Eastern managed to lay a permanent link with New York.

Today’s submarine cables are necessarily far more advanced, using fibre optic cables that are capable of carrying vast amounts of information almost instantaneously. The submarine cable between Cuba and Venezuela, like all other undersea cables around the world, will be around 69 millimetres in diameter and will weigh about a ton per 100 metres, which means that Alcatel Shanghai Bell will need to lay over 50,000 tons of cable to connect Cuba to Venezuela with the new submarine cable.

The weight is due to the modern design of undersea cables. In the days of the Trans-Atlantic Telegraph a simple copper cable wrapped in a primitive insulator, usually the melted gum gutta-percha from a gutta tree and other materials, was used to protect the conductive core from water.

However, modern cables are far more advanced with six layers: the fibre optic wires in the middle and a range of materials to protect them, such as petroleum jelly, which is then encased in a layer of copper tubing, which is itself protected by malleable plastic or polycarbonate, which is protected by an aluminium layer to keep water out the inner cable and bands of thin steel wires that give the cable its relative rigidity to prevent damage to the fibre optic wires. These wires are wrapped in Mylar tape, which is similar to cling-wrap but far stronger, which in turn is covered by plastic tubing derived from polythenes.

In the modern day, every single continent in the world except Antarctica is linked using a submarine cable.