While you may have never heard of TAT-8, there is a good chance you sent some data through it. TAT-8 was the 8th transatlantic communications cable and the first transatlantic fiber-optic cable, carrying 560 Mbit/s on two fibers between Tuckerton, New Jersey, and, thanks to an underwater splitting device, Widemouth Bay, England, and Penmarch, France. Construction of the cable began in 1998. Later that year, the first call, made by [Issac Asimov] took place. The cable was retired in 2002. Now, Subsea Environmental Services is recovering the cable for recycling.The 6,000 km cable was built by a consortium of companies including AT&T, France Télécom, and British Telecom. The 1.3 micron fiber used special optical repeaters about 40 km apart and cost about $335 million (just shy of a billion dollars today). Designers were optimistic, with some claiming the cable would end the need for future cables or, at least, that the cable would not reach capacity for ten years or more. In reality, the cable was saturated within 18 months. Turns out, the equivalent of 40,000 phone lines wasn’t enough.In all fairness, the saturation might have been difficult to predict, but it may also have been hastened by the cable itself. In 1989, IBM funded a dedicated T1 link between CERN and Cornell University. Ten months later, [Tim Berners Lee] would use this link to demonstrate his new development: The World Wide Web.According to Subsea Environmental Services, the cable still looked new after lying on the seabed for four decades. We’ve looked at the tech behind these undersea cables before. Not to mention the history behind the TAT cables.