【题目】Data on Ocean Floors

1 At the water’ s edge of Baltimore Harbor , two freshly painted gray ships await to be

sent out on their next mission. These are the workhorses of the Information Revolution. They are wiring the world to meet the explosive and seemingly limitless demand for Internet , voice and video services , projected to be a $ 1 trillion-a-year global market by 2000. The two ships , C. S. Global Link and its companion the C. S. Global Mariner, are among the most technologically advanced vessels in the business of laying undersea fiber-optic communications cables. They are part of a worldwide fleet , owned by Tyco International Ltd. , that has installed more transoceanic fiber than any other company.

2 Most of the world’ s telephone and Internet traffic courses through these hair thin

capillaries of glass , which stretch from one continent to another along the ocean floor. In constant pulses of light, coded in the computer language of ones and zeros , they flash millions of phone calls, electronic mail messages, video clips and World Wide Web pages at light speed.

3 Undersea fiber-optic cables have become one of the most crucial components of

today’ s communications-based global economy, despite mìd-1960s predictions that satellites would make earthbound long-distance communications obsolete.

4 “Most people really do not realize the amount of telephone cables that are undersea ,

and that their calls actually go through them,” said Rob Jones , captain of the C. S. Global Link. There are 228 ,958 miles (368 ,472 kilometers) of fiber-optic cable on the floors of the world’s sea , enough to encircle Earth almost 10 times, according to KMI Corp. of Rhode Island. Another 177,717 miles of cable are planned for installation worldwide by 2000 , KMI estimates.

5 That figure does not count the most ambitious program , Project Oxygen, which

backers describe as a $ 11 billion “Super Internet” that would pay out 198 , 841 miles of mainly undersea fiber-optic cable touching 175 countries. Oxygen already has the backing of 30 international tele-communications providers and is scheduled for completion in 2003. Project Oxygen is “the most ambitious project of communications in the 20th century ,” said President John Kestrel of KMI. The internet is a major driver of the expansion. The second driver is the need for video transmissions.

6 Global deregulation of telecommunications markets is also playing a key role in the subsea fiber boom. Phone companies around the world are rapidly going private and

governments are opening their markets to competition. Chinese officials , for example , cleverly played 14 competitors off each other in bids to build the first link between China and the United States- and then ultimately told them all to share the $ 1 billion contract.

7 Phrases such as “quantum leap” and “orders of magnitude” frequently come up in discussions about advances in undersea fiber optics. In 1998 , when glass fibers began to replace copper in telecommunications , people stopped talking in terms of hundreds of simultaneous phone calls per cable and started talking about tens of thousands. Scientists at companies such as Ciena Corp. of Maryland have more than quadrupled fiber-cable capacity by using lasers to split light into colors, sending data through each path in a process called “wave division multiplexing. ” The newest trans-Atlantic cable can handle 2.4 million voice conversations at one time – or hundreds of thousands of compressed video images. The China-U. S. project will handle 4 million calls at once.

8 Lucent Technology Inc. , one of the leading fiber optic companies , unveiled the latest breakthrough. The ability to transmit as many as 10 million calls over a single fiber by dividing the strand into 80 separate wavelengths of light instead of 16. Lucent says the cable’ s 400-gigabit (billions of computer instructions per second) speed is enough to carry the world’ s Internet traffic at any given time on one fiber. One voice phone cal1 requires 64 ,000 bits. Is there any limit to the capacity increase? “Absolutely not ,” said Neil Tagare , Project Oxygen’s founder and an undersea fiber veteran , “There is in sight.”

9 And as the boom in fiber-optics continues , the cost of fiber decreases. Each voice

circuit in a pre-fiber trans-At1antic cable in 1987 cost about $ 40 ,00 annually to build and maintain , Mr. Kessler said. Today , the cost has dropped to roughly to $ 100 to $ 200 per circuit , he said. The plunging costs , combined with deregulation and competition in phone markets , have made distance meaningless in communications – and the price of calls.

10 Aboard the C. S. Global Link , Captain Jones remains very busy. The ship returned

to Baltimore from the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean , after dropping 2 ,000 miles of cable from Bombay to Malaysia as part of another major project , called Fiber Link Around the Globe. Before Bombay, it helped to lay Atlantic Crossing. covering 3 ,557 miles of fiber-optic cables at an average speed of 6 knots over 21 days. It takes less than two months to install a trans-Atlantic cable. Ships use computers that are programmed to follow a specific route using global positioning satellite navigation systems. The routes are chosen after careful undersea topographical surveys that consider such factors as underwater earthquake faults , canyons and shipping and fishing routes. “If global 1inks continue to grow as they have in the last decade , it’ s going to get kind of crowded down there , ” says Jones.

 to install a trans-Atlantic cable takes ____.

 

 

 

 less than 21 days

 more than 2 years

 less than 2 months