What Lives on the Ocean Floor — and Why It's About to Matter More Than Ever
The cables beneath the Atlantic built the modern internet. Now nearly half of them are aging out — and where they land next will reshape global connectivity for a generation.
The Ocean Has Always Been the Network
Before satellites. Before fiber optics. Before the internet as we know it. The world's most consequential communications infrastructure has always run along the seafloor. Every email you've ever sent across an ocean, every video call with a colleague in London, every financial transaction between New York and Frankfurt — all of it travels through cables lying in the deep Atlantic, pressed against the continental shelf, buried in the sand off the Jersey Shore.
The history of subsea cables is, in many ways, the history of globalization itself. And as that infrastructure enters an unprecedented moment of strain — aging systems, exploding demand, and a generation of cables built for a pre-cloud world reaching end of life — the decisions made in the next few years will define the shape of the global internet for decades.
Understanding where we are requires understanding where we started.
More than 95% of international data traffic crosses the ocean not through satellites, but through submarine cables running along the seafloor.↗ They are invisible infrastructure — and they are under pressure like never before.
160 Years of Undersea Connectivity
-
1858The First Transatlantic Telegraph Cable
After years of failed attempts, Cyrus West Field's Atlantic Telegraph Company successfully laid a cable connecting Valentia Island, Ireland to Newfoundland. On August 16, 1858, Queen Victoria and President Buchanan exchanged the world's first transatlantic messages — the Queen's 98-word greeting took over 16 hours to transmit.↗ The cable failed within weeks, but the concept was proven. The world would never think about distance the same way again.
-
1866The First Permanent Transatlantic Link
The SS Great Eastern successfully laid the first permanent transatlantic telegraph cable — and retrieved the failed 1865 cable, splicing it back into service. For the first time, two cables bridged the Atlantic simultaneously.↗ The era of instantaneous transatlantic communication had truly begun.
-
1956TAT-1: The First Transatlantic Telephone Cable
TAT-1, jointly operated by AT&T, the British Post Office, and Canada's overseas telecom corporation, became the first transatlantic telephone cable — capable of carrying 36 simultaneous calls. It went into service on September 25, 1956.↗ Demand exceeded capacity from day one, an early pattern that would repeat at every subsequent inflection point in the internet's history.
-
1988TAT-8: The Fiber Revolution Reaches the Ocean Floor
TAT-8 became the first transatlantic fiber optic cable on December 14, 1988, built by a consortium led by AT&T, British Telecom, and France Telecom at a cost of approximately $335 million. Connecting Tuckerton, New Jersey to the UK and France, its capacity was fully utilized within just 18 months — a stark signal that global appetite for digital data was growing faster than infrastructure planners had anticipated.↗ TAT-8 was retired in 2002 after developing an unrepairable fault, and in 2025 its physical cable began being removed from the seafloor for recycling.↗
-
1990s–2000sThe Dot-Com Build-Out — and the Glut
The rise of the commercial internet triggered a massive wave of submarine cable investment. Cables including TAT-14, Columbus III, and others were laid at enormous expense. When the dot-com bubble burst, the glut of dark fiber drove capacity prices into the floor. TAT-14, the last of the iconic TAT series, was retired on December 15, 2020.↗ Many of the cables built in that era are the ones approaching end of life today.
-
2010s–PresentHyperscalers Enter the Ocean Floor
Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon began investing directly in submarine cable infrastructure. Cables like Google's Grace Hopper — connecting New York, Bude (UK), and Bilbao (Spain) with a design capacity of 352 Tbps, entering service in 2022 — marked a structural shift.↗ The dominant users of transatlantic capacity had become the dominant investors in it. As of 2025, TeleGeography tracks 570 in-service submarine cable systems globally, with another 81 planned.↗
-
NowThe Infrastructure Gap — and the NJFX Moment
In 2025 alone, the International Cable Protection Committee reported 150–200 cable outages worldwide, illustrating the growing fragility of these networks.↗ AI workloads, cloud computing, and real-time financial applications are compounding bandwidth demands on transatlantic cables — some built for a world that predated cloud computing entirely. The way those cables reach their terrestrial destinations — through legacy carrier hand-offs and urban aggregation points — introduces exactly the kind of latency and fragility that modern applications can least afford. This is the problem NJFX was built to solve.
Aging Cables, Accelerating Demand
The transatlantic internet infrastructure was not built for this moment. The cables that carry the world's most critical data traffic were engineered decades ago — for different use cases, under different demand assumptions. As AI workloads, cloud computing, and real-time financial applications require more bandwidth than ever, much of the physical infrastructure beneath the ocean was designed for another era.
When the dot-com era cables were originally built in the mid-1990s, their expected system life was 15–20 years.↗ Many have been extended through upgrades, but a meaningful share of transatlantic cable infrastructure is now well past or approaching that original design horizon. Meanwhile, investment is accelerating globally — some $11 billion in new cable builds is planned for 2024–26, double the amount invested in the previous three years, with internet giants accounting for the bulk of that capital.↗
New cables take years to plan, permit, fund, and deploy. The engineering is complex, the investment is enormous — and the landing station infrastructure where subsea meets terrestrial is itself a limiting factor. You can build a new cable, but if the facility on shore isn't carrier-neutral, isn't technically capable of direct interconnection, and isn't positioned away from legacy aggregation points, you've simply moved the bottleneck to a different address.
This is exactly the problem NJFX was built to solve.
Every Cable Accessible from NJFX
Two cables land directly at NJFX's facility in Wall Township — including the only systems on the US East Coast providing direct access to Norway. The HAVFRUE / AEC-2, which entered service December 1, 2020, was the first new cable to connect mainland Northern Europe to the US in nearly two decades.↗ Seabras-1 remains the only direct point-to-point cable between the New York metro and São Paulo, Brazil.↗
HAVFRUE / AEC-2
Seabras-1
TGN-Atlantic
Grace Hopper
Apollo
AEC Connect
Gemini Bermuda
WALL-LI
The Convergence Point the Industry Has Been Missing
For most of the history of submarine cables, the way capacity reached end users was fundamentally broken. A cable would land at a beach manhole, run to a nearby building, and then enter the hands of a legacy carrier — who would backhaul that capacity to a metropolitan aggregation point, where it would be carved up, re-sold, and handed off again. Each step added latency. Each hand-off added cost. Each aggregation point added a single point of failure.
NJFX was built to eliminate those hand-offs entirely — by creating the only place on the US East Coast where subsea cable infrastructure and terrestrial carrier networks converge in a single, carrier-neutral facility. No intermediaries. No additional hops. Direct interconnection, under one roof.
The Only Path to Norway on the US East Coast
HAVFRUE / AEC-2, which lands directly at NJFX, was the first new cable to connect mainland Northern Europe to the US in nearly two decades when it entered service in 2020.↗ It is the only US East Coast cable providing direct access to Norway — and offers unique routes into Denmark and Ireland.
True Carrier Neutrality
With 28+ carriers, operators, and networks present on campus, NJFX operates as a genuine open exchange — no single carrier controls the relationship. Customers set the terms. Competition keeps quality up and price honest.
Latency Optimized by Design
Direct cable head access means traffic enters the subsea system at the source — not after traveling through legacy backhaul. Seabras-1, for example, delivers a measured latency of just 105.05ms round trip between the Nasdaq data center in New Jersey and Brazil's B3 exchange in São Paulo.↗
NYC Proximity Without NYC Risk
Wall Township sits 60 miles from Manhattan — close enough to serve as the New York metro's cable edge, far enough to remain outside the infrastructure density and vulnerability concentration that defines New York's telecom hubs.
Route Diversity Across Three Continents
Eight cable systems reaching Europe, South America, and Bermuda from one address. Engineers can design genuinely redundant multi-path architectures without managing multiple facility relationships across different geographies.
Built for the AI Era
As AI inference workloads demand low-latency transatlantic paths, NJFX provides the cable head access the hyperscaler era built on. New cable builds are accelerating globally — $11 billion planned for 2024–26 alone↗ — and where those cables land will determine who can use them.
The Next Wave of Transatlantic Infrastructure
The history of the transatlantic cable is a history of moments where the old infrastructure couldn't keep up with what the world was becoming. The telegraph cable of 1866 couldn't carry telephone calls. The copper cables of the 1950s couldn't handle the bandwidth the internet demanded. The dot-com era cables built for one iteration of the internet are straining under the demands of the next.
Each inflection point required not just new technology in the cable itself, but new infrastructure on shore. New landing points. New facilities where the capacity could actually be used. The bottleneck was never the ocean — it was what happened when the cable came out of it.
That inflection point is here again. The retirement of aging transatlantic cables, combined with the exponential growth in AI-driven data traffic and $11 billion in new cable investment on the horizon, represents both a challenge and a defining opportunity. New cables will be built. New capacity will cross the Atlantic. The question is where that capacity lands, who can access it, and whether the shore-side infrastructure is ready for what the ocean is about to carry.
NJFX was built for this moment — the only carrier-neutral cable landing station on the US East Coast where subsea cable infrastructure and terrestrial networks physically converge, without intermediaries, under one roof.
— NJFX, Wall Township, New JerseyAs new cables are planned — designed with AI workloads and hyperscale cloud infrastructure in mind — the landing station infrastructure that greets them on shore matters as much as the engineering that crossed the ocean. NJFX's unique position at the intersection of subsea and terrestrial networks makes it not just a facility from the last era of transatlantic infrastructure, but the foundation of the next one.
Sources & Further Reading
- 1TeleGeography — How Many Submarine Cables Are There, Anyway? (Feb. 2026) — 570 in-service systems, 81 planned
- 2Atlantic Council — Cyber Defense Across the Ocean Floor — 95%+ of intercontinental data travels via submarine cables
- 3History.com — The First Transatlantic Telegraph Cable — 1858 cable history, Queen Victoria and President Buchanan
- 4Submarine Networks — Recovery of TAT-8 — TAT-8 history, 2025 cable removal operation
- 5BGR — World's First Transatlantic Internet Cable Being Pulled From the Ocean (Mar. 2026)
- 6Submarine Networks — TAT-14 Cable System — retired December 15, 2020
- 7Submarine Networks — Old Cables Don't Die But Do They Just Fade Away — cable lifecycle analysis
- 8Eurasian Review — Digital Lifelines: Undersea Cables, Chokepoints, and the Evolving Sea Lines of Communication (Dec. 2025)
- 9Wikipedia — Grace Hopper Submarine Cable — 352 Tbps design capacity, service date Sept. 2022
- 10Submarine Networks — HAVFRUE / AEC-2 — first Northern Europe–US cable in nearly two decades, RFS December 2020
- 11Aqua Comms — AEC-2 Network — cable specs, landing points, commercial terms
- 12Seaborn Networks — Seabras-1 — only direct PoP-to-PoP cable between São Paulo and New York
- 13Submarine Networks — Seabras-1 System Details — 105.05ms RTD latency, NJ to Brazil Stock Exchange
- 14Breached.company — Red Sea Cable Cuts: The Hidden Crisis — $11B in cable investment 2024–26
Ready to Connect at the Cable Head?
Talk to our team about subsea access, route diversity, and carrier-neutral interconnection at NJFX.
