8. Conclusion

Since the first submarine link using optical amplification (TAT 12/13) in 1996, the deployment of these links has seen fantastic growth, with more than 1,000,000 km of submerged cables today. The key success factors of this technology are transmission capacity and repeater reliability (less than three failures per link in 25 years). In twenty years, fiber transmission capacity has increased 2,000-fold, from 5 Gb/s in 1995 to over 10 Tb/s in 2015. This has been made possible by two major technological developments:

• wavelength division multiplexing (up to 100 wavelengths per fiber) appeared in 1998 with the Gemini transatlantic link (now out of service) and especially in 2000 with the Sea-ME-We 3 network, which was also the first system to offer fixed OADM (Optical Add Drop Multiplexing) functionality in underwater equipment;

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