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A comment on The invisible seafaring industry that keeps the internet afloat. Parent comment

Re:The invisible seafaring industry that keeps the internet ... by khuey on Thursday April 18, 2024 @12:29PM (#40077934)
> I believe until very recently there was so much fibre laid during the dot com boom, that we didn't really need to lay much more.

My understanding is that there was a one-two punch of the dot com boom laying a huge amount of fiber followed by wave division multiplexing shortly afterwards massively increasing the capacity of existing fiber that resulted in an oversupply that lasted a decade or more.

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Re:The invisible seafaring industry that keeps the internet ... by NortySpock on Thursday April 18, 2024 @05:21PM (#40080854)
Wave Division Multiplexing being substantially enabled by all-optical amplifiers in the late 1990's it seems, because otherwise you have to convert optical to electrical signal, amplifiy that, and reconvert that back into an optical signal in order to travel down the next length of fiber-optic.

With optical amplifiers you can amplifiy every color of the rainbow at once, without breaking the chain.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_amplifier

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