The Isle of Man has an extensive communications infrastructure consisting of telephone cables, submarine cables, and an array of television and mobile phone transmitters and towers.
A submarine communications cable is a cable laid on the seabed between land-based stations to carry telecommunication signals across stretches of ocean and sea. The first submarine communications cables were laid beginning in the 1850s and carried telegraphy traffic, establishing the first instant telecommunications links between continents, such as the first transatlantic telegraph cable which became operational on 16 August 1858.
SAT-3/WASC or South Atlantic 3/West Africa Submarine Cable is a submarine communications cable linking Portugal and Spain to South Africa, with connections to several West African countries along the route.
The Isle of Man to England Interconnector is a submarine power cable connecting the transmission system of the Manx Utilities Authority to that of Great Britain. With an undersea section of approximately 104 km, it is the second longest AC undersea cable in the world.
Fibre-optic Link Around the Globe (FLAG) is a 28,000-kilometre-long fibre optic mostly-submarine communications cable that connects the United Kingdom, Japan, India, and many places in between. The cable is operated by Global Cloud Xchange, a subsidiary of RCOM. The system runs from the eastern coast of North America to Japan. Its Europe–Asia segment was the fourth longest cable in the world in 2008.
South East Asia–Middle East–Western Europe 4 is an optical fibre submarine communications cable system that carries telecommunications between Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Italy, Tunisia, Algeria and France. It is intended to be a complement to, rather than a replacement for, the SEA-ME-WE 3 cable.
TEAMS is an initiative spearheaded by the government of Kenya to link the country to the rest of the world through a submarine fibre optic cable. It was first proposed as an alternative to EASSy, the East African Submarine Cable System. The Kenyan government had grown frustrated with the ownership model favoured by South Africa, the time it was taking and what it perceived as an attempt by South Africa to control the cable. As a result, in November 2006, the Kenyan government decided to partner with the Emirates Telecommunication Establishment (Etisalat) to build its own fibre optic cable.
SHEFA-2 is an undersea communication cable linking the Faroe Islands to mainland Scotland via the Northern Isles. It is named after the route on which it is being deployed (SHEtland-FAroes) and succeeds an earlier cable called SHEFA-1 on the same route.
Telecommunications in Guyana include radio, television, fixed and mobile telephones, and the Internet. Early telecommunications were owned by large foreign firms until the industry was nationalized in the 1970s. Government stifled criticism with a tight control of the media, and the infrastructure lagged behind other countries, Guyana Telephone and Telegraph Company (GT&T) holding a monopoly on most such services. In a 2012 census report on Guyanese households, 55.5% had a radio, 82.7% had a television, 27.8% had a personal computer, and 16.2% had internet at home, 49.3% had a telephone landline, and 70.6% had a cellular phone.
The Main One Cable is a submarine communications cable stretching from Portugal to South Africa with landings along the route in various west African countries. On April 28, 2008, it was announced that Main Street Technologies has awarded a turnkey supply contract for the Main One Cable System to Tyco Telecommunications.
The West Africa Cable System (WACS) is a submarine communications cable linking South Africa with the United Kingdom along the west coast of Africa that was constructed by Alcatel-Lucent. The cable consists of four fibre pairs and is 14,530 km in length, linking from Yzerfontein in the Western Cape of South Africa to London in the United Kingdom. It has 14 landing points, 12 along the western coast of Africa and 2 in Europe completed on land by a cable termination station in London. The total cost for the cable system is $650 million. WACS was originally known as the Africa West Coast Cable (AWCC) and was planned to branch to South America but this was dropped and the system eventually became the West African Cable System.
C.S. Sovereign is a class DP2 type cable ship used for subsea cable installation and repair works. The ship was designed by BT Marine with Hart Fenton & Company as Naval Architects and built by Van der Giessen de Noord in 1991.
Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha is a British Overseas Territory in the South Atlantic, consisting of the island of Saint Helena, Ascension Island and the archipelago of Tristan da Cunha including Gough Island. Their communications provision includes dedicated radio and television stations, and telecommunications infrastructure.
The Mafuta is a diamond-mining ship owned and operated by De Beers in the western coast of South Africa. Built in 1983 as Dock Express 20 for Dock Express Shipping, the semisubmersible, multirole, heavy-lift vessel was converted to the world's largest cable layer in 1993. In 2005, she was purchased by De Beers, and converted to a subsea diamond-mining ship by A&P Tyne over the course of 11 months. The ship's new name, Peace in Africa, may have implied that it was providing an alternative to blood diamonds. In 2013, still under ownership of De Beers Marine Namibia, the vessel was renamed to MV Mafuta.
SAex is a proposed submarine communications cable linking South Africa to the United States with branches to Namibia, Saint Helena, and Brazil.
The South Atlantic Cable System or SACS, is a submarine communications cable in the South Atlantic Ocean linking Luanda, Angola with Fortaleza, Brazil with a leg connecting the Brazilian archipelago of Fernando de Noronha as well. It is the first low latency routing between Africa and South America.
The Caucasus Cable System is a Georgian-owned submarine communications cable in the Black Sea linking Poti, Georgia to Balchik, Bulgaria over a distance of 1,182 km. Its landing station in Balchik is connected to Frankfurt, Germany and other European Internet hubs via terrestrial connection. As the only communications cable linking Georgia directly to Europe, the Caucasus Cable System is deemed of geostrategic importance and has been at the center of controversy due to alleged plans to sell it to a Russian-owned company. As of January 2017 the cable is still in sole ownership of Caucasus Online.
The BRICS Cable is a planned optical fibre submarine communications cable system that carries telecommunications between the BRICS countries, specifically Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. The cable was announced in 2012 but was still under construction as of 2015. The project aims to provide bandwidth around the Southern Hemisphere of the globe and to "ensure that developing nations’ communications are not all in the hands of the nations of the North".
MAREA is a 6,605 km long transatlantic communications cable connecting the United States with Spain. Owned and funded by Microsoft and Meta Platforms, but constructed and operated by Telxius, a subsidiary of the Spanish telecom company Telefónica, it is the "highest-capacity submarine cable in the world" with a system design capacity of 200 terabits per second as of 2019.
