Terrestrial radio

The extension of telephone service to other countries and continents was a goal set in the earliest days of telephone systems. In North America, service to Canada and Mexico was a natural extension of the long-distance methods used within the United States, but transmission across the ocean to Europe called for a significant amount of ingenuity. While transatlantic telegraph cables had been in service since 1866, these same cables could not be used for voice transmission, because of bandwidth limitations. Instead, the first transatlantic telephone service made use of radio. Regular service via radio between the United States and Europe was first established in 1927 using long-wave frequencies in the range of 58.5 to 61.5 kilohertz. Within the first year this system supported 11,000 calls. By 1929 additional circuits were added in the range of 6–25 megahertz.

Undersea cable

It was soon realized that the number of transatlantic telephone calls would rapidly outgrow available radio spectrum. Accordingly, transoceanic cable technology was developed that made use of amplifiers or repeaters placed at regular intervals along the length of the cable. Early deployment of undersea cables had been accomplished previously in 1921, with a 184-km-long (114-mile-long) cable between Cuba and Key West, Florida. The first transatlantic cable was laid in 1956 between Canada and Scotland—specifically, between Clarenville, Newfoundland, Canada, and Oban, Scotland, a distance of 3,584 km (2,226 miles). This system made use of two coaxial cables, one for each direction, and used analog FDM to carry 36 two-way voice circuits. With the availability of the cable system, transatlantic telephone traffic increased dramatically, from 1.7 million calls in 1955 to 3.7 million in 1960. Six additional coaxial cables, representing four successive generations of cable design, were laid across the Atlantic Ocean between 1956 and 1983. Each generation of cable system supported a greater number of voice circuits—the last supporting 4,200. In order to improve the voice channel capacity of transoceanic cable systems, a method of voice data reduction known as time assignment speech interpolation, or TASI, was introduced. In TASI the natural pauses occurring in speech were used to carry other speech conversations. In this way a coaxial cable system designed for 4,200 two-way voice circuits could support 10,500 circuits.

Developments in fibre optics also had a significant effect on the deployment of undersea cable. From 1989 to 2001 a total of 15 new transatlantic optical fibre cables were deployed, along with a similar number of transpacific cables. Many other short-segment undersea cables were deployed to connect various countries within a continent. Since 1996 many of these optical cables have employed erbium-doped fibre amplifiers and wave division multiplexing, permitting the highest-quality data transmission at very high rates. One of the more ambitious programs, the TAT-14, deployed in 2001, connects the United States, France, Germany, Denmark, and the United Kingdom with a 15,428-km (9,581-mile) undersea cable. As deployed, the cable has four fibre pairs and has a protected capacity of 640 gigabits per second, corresponding to roughly 9.6 million voice circuits. Owing to such capacity, TASI is no longer needed to increase the number of voice circuits over undersea cable.

Satellite

About the same time that transatlantic cables were being installed, another transmission method, satellite communication, was being investigated. In 1962 AT&T in conjunction with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) launched the communication satellite Telstar into an elliptical medium Earth orbit, its apogee, or farthest distance from Earth, being some 5,600 km (3,500 miles). Telstar 1 served as a repeater in the sky; that is, it simply translated all frequencies within its receiving bandwidth in the six-gigahertz band to frequencies in its four-gigahertz transmitting band. The 32-megahertz transmission bandwidth of Telstar 1 could support one one-way television signal or multiple two-way telephone conversations.

Because of its low orbit, Telstar was not always in view of the communications ground stations. This problem was solved in July 1963 with the launch of the first geostationary communication satellite, Syncom 2, which followed a circular path some 35,900 km (22,300 miles) above the Earth. Syncom 2 was followed by a series of geostationary satellites, each providing a capacity greater than the previous generation. For instance, the Intelsat 11 satellite, launched October 5, 2007, which orbits above the Equator at longitude 43° W (just east of Brazil), uses 12 active C-band transponders to relay digital data over most of North and South America and uses 18 Ku-band transponders primarily for relaying television broadcasts in Brazil.

Unfortunately, geostationary satellites, because of their great distance above the Earth, introduce a quarter-second signal delay, sometimes making two-way voice conversation difficult. For this reason, and also because of the availability of high-capacity undersea cables, geostationary satellites are no longer used for common-carrier telephone communication in much of the world. However, since optical-fibre connections are not available everywhere, geostationary satellites continue to be launched to support voice as well as data traffic.