Transatlantic Cables Terminated in Avon NJ

I couldn’t resist this juxtaposition. These cables are VSNL submarine telecommunications cables that cross the Atlantic and come above ground in the VSNL building in Avon, NJ. They are capable of carrying over an estimated 3.5 Tbps (that is terabits per second). Probably less from over head and my guess from the article’s figure (60,000,000 simultaneous voice calls = 60,000,000 DS0s = 60,000,000 * 64kb/s). In any case, those cables are extremely important for international communication but they look like utterly unimportant buried utility cable. Just a great photograph. Via Wired.