My Dad was an ROV technician for a brief period in the early 2000s, he got made redundant in early 2002 just after 9/11, and the dot com bubble bursting.
On his last of the only two trips he made, he was based in Recife in northern Brazil. The ship was just there, on call, ready to respond to any breakages.
My Mum, sister, and I were lucky enough to be flown out to Brazil for Christmas 2001, and it's something I'll never forget.
I got to fuse bits of fibre-optic cable together under a microscope, drive an ROV about in the harbour a bit, and stand in some massive cable drums (all incredibly exciting for an eight year old child). It was the first time I went abroad, and the first time my Mum flew on a plane.
It's amazing how much damage the dot com bubble bursting did to the industry, and the people who worked in it (I don't think my Dad ever really recovered from it). I believe until very recently there was so much fibre laid during the dot com boom, that we didn't really need to lay much more.
> I believe until very recently there was so much fibre laid during the dot com boom, that we didn't really need to lay much more.
My understanding is that there was a one-two punch of the dot com boom laying a huge amount of fiber followed by wave division multiplexing shortly afterwards massively increasing the capacity of existing fiber that resulted in an oversupply that lasted a decade or more.
Wave Division Multiplexing being substantially enabled by all-optical amplifiers in the late 1990's it seems, because otherwise you have to convert optical to electrical signal, amplifiy that, and reconvert that back into an optical signal in order to travel down the next length of fiber-optic.
With optical amplifiers you can amplifiy every color of the rainbow at once, without breaking the chain.
On his last of the only two trips he made, he was based in Recife in northern Brazil. The ship was just there, on call, ready to respond to any breakages.
My Mum, sister, and I were lucky enough to be flown out to Brazil for Christmas 2001, and it's something I'll never forget. I got to fuse bits of fibre-optic cable together under a microscope, drive an ROV about in the harbour a bit, and stand in some massive cable drums (all incredibly exciting for an eight year old child). It was the first time I went abroad, and the first time my Mum flew on a plane.
It's amazing how much damage the dot com bubble bursting did to the industry, and the people who worked in it (I don't think my Dad ever really recovered from it). I believe until very recently there was so much fibre laid during the dot com boom, that we didn't really need to lay much more.