Fifteen Thousand Kilometres of Fibre-Optic Football

A little over two and a half years from now, you’ll be watching the 2010 World Cup. Maybe you’ll be lucky enough to be in South Africa, maybe you’ll even get tickets to a game. I hope so. But if not then you’ll be watching it on television, along with the rest of the world. If you’re like me, you’ll probably just turn on the TV and start watching, not thinking about how the action gets from a stadium in, say, Durban all the way to your house. I can’t tell you exactly how it happens, but I can tell you it will have something to do with a very long, very expensive and (if you like football) very important underwater cable that’s about to be laid.

Work is set to begin any day now on the underwater telecommunications cable, which will allow South Africa to broadcast to the world. The $650 million fibre-optic cable will begin in Mtunzini, South Africa, and then stretch 15,000 kilometres to connect viewers in East Africa, India and Europe to all the World Cup action. It says here that it will broadcast at 1.28-terabytes per second, which I’m going to assume is good. I didn’t think bytes got any bigger than mega, so tera must be pretty damn fast.