PTAT-1

PTAT-1 was the first privately financed transatlantic fiber optic telecommunications cable, which was completed in 1989, at a cost of $600 million USD. It was maintained by Cable & Wireless (C&W) and Sprint/PSI, and connected Manasquan, New Jersey, United States, with Devonshire, Bermuda, and Ballinspittle, Republic of Ireland, terminating at Brean, England, United Kingdom, for a distance of 7,552 kilometres (4,693 miles; 4,078 nautical miles).

The significance of PTAT-1 is that it broke the international telecommunication monopoly held by AT&T Corporation and British Telecom (BT) for telecommunications between the US and UK, and set off the mass production of fiber optic systems that now circle the world.

PTAT-1 was built by a joint venture of a small private US company, Private TransAtlantic Telecommunication Systems, Inc. (PSI, Inc., founded as Tel-Optik in 1984) and Cable & Wireless plc of the UK. The submarine cable system and line terminal equipment were provided by Standard Telephones and Cables (STC)[1], and alarm and control system management by International Computers Limited (ICL). The US shore end was built by Lightwave Spectrum. On August 15th, 1989, US Sprint Corp. acquired 100% of PSI, Inc., and thereby acquired 50% interest in PTAT-1.

The UK to US section of the cable was shutdown just after 02:00 hours on 8 February 2004, as it was no longer considered financially viable by Cable & Wireless. Competitors to the cable had dropped their prices drastically after they re-emerged from Chapter 11 Bankruptcy with little or no debts to service, something C&W was unable to compete with.

This cable provided intelligent repeaters that counted bit errors which were reported in response to interrogation from a base station. It contained three fiber pairs which were used to provide two active channels. Each repeater included a base station-controlled cross-over data switch to swap traffic through a choice of two fiber pairs, the switch connections in successive repeaters enabled any desired connection to be made and provide a diversity path when required.