As Neptune’s trident has struck Port Alberni this December 8th 2009 he must have remembered the day more than a century ago when the All Red Line was completed close by at the Bamfield Cable Station in October 1902. The first Global network circling the Globe, projecting the might of the British Empire and Neptune’s first globe spanning copper belt.

I would suspect that not many current Tata Communications employees formerly from Teleglobe are aware that the Canadian All Red landing stations became part of what one day would become the COTC (Canadian Overseas Telecommunication Corporation) renamed Teleglobe in 1975. No current employee, for sure, remembers that the initial cable station was in Bamfield on Vancouver Island. The Bamfield Marine Centre happens to be located on the old cable station property and its website provides some interesting tidbits. The original cable station was constructed in 1902, with the underwater telegraph cable laid in October of the same year by the cable ship Colonia and operated by the Eastern Pacific Board (EPB). The cable ran nearly 4,000 miles across the Pacific from Bamfield to Fanning Island, an atoll in the mid-Pacific which the British annexed specifically for that purpose as they wanted the cable completely on British territory. From there the cable continued to Fiji, New Zealand and Australia. We further learn that The Canadian Pacific Railway Company constructed the Cable Station plus Bachelors Quarters and Manager’s House in 1901-1902, and that on November 1st 1902, the first two telegraph messages to encircle the globe were relayed. In 1926, a second building was constructed and at the same time, a second cable was laid via Hawaii to Suva, Fiji.

In 1950 the Canadian Government nationalized international telegraph cable assets and formed COTC taking over the Bamfield Cable Station. In 1953, the two cables were extended up the Alberni Canal and in 1959, a new state-of-the-art cable station was built in Port Alberni and the Bamfield Cable Station was shut down. The last messages were sent from Bamfield on June 20th, 1959.

The next highlight would take place in late 1963 with the inauguration of the British Commonwealth COMPAC, the first global cable system suited for telephony landing in Port Alberni. COMPAC was to a certain extent a post colonial successor of the Imperial All Red Line. The idea was to link the UK, South Africa, Sri Lanka, India, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and back to UK with an undersea telephone cable system ringing the world. For the Canadian portion of the ring, Teleglobe, still called COTC in those days, completed the transatlantic Cantat-1 in 1961 while the Trans Canada portion was microwave based and installed by Canadian Pacific Railways across the continent all the way to Vancouver Island. HRH, Queen Elisabeth inaugurated the COMPAC system with a call to Australia. The capacity of COMPAC was 80 telephone circuits and one telephone circuit could carry 22 telegraph channels!

Then came ANZCAN in 1984, as a replacement for COMPAC. The cable had a capacity of 1,380 telephone circuits, quite amazing compared to COMPAC twenty years earlier. The Canada-Hawaii portion of good old ANZCAN went into retirement in 1997.

The crowning achievement and grand finale at Port Alberni was the installation and activation of TPC-4 in 1992. This cable pioneered deep-sea cable branching as two cables, one leaving from Port Alberni and one from Point Arena north of San Francisco in California, joined together with at a deep-sea junction and continued as one cable to Chikura in Japan. Naysayers at the time said such undersea branching would never work but business and political considerations plus the persuasion of our VP Engineering at the time, Martin Fournier, prevailed. Needless to say that today, undersea branching is common place.

The early days of 1997 then saw TPC-5 coming on-line with two landing points in the USA, one at San Luis Obispo, California and the Northern landing at Brandon, Oregon. By then the political imperatives to have a landing point within Canadian waters had all but vanished in the context of competition, efficiency and liberalization of the telecom market. It made more economic and business sense to connect terrestrially to Bandon. The days of¨Port Alberni as a cable landing station were counted. It was a matter of how long TPC-4 would still continue to be commercially viable. Marking the end of an era, TPC-4 was decommissioned late 2003 and for the first time in more than a century no transpacific cable traffic reached or left the Canadian shores.

In the fall 2004 the cable station was sold to the University of Victoria for a most worthwhile project. The Neptune initiative is run by a consortium of university and scientific organizations, lead by the University of Victoria and received its first funding in 2003. University of Victoria bought the former Teleglobe cable landing station building on Mallory drive. The 800-kilometre cable network launched this month starts and ends in Port Alberni describing a 800 km long ring at the ocean bottom. The cable was specially built by Alcatel as it has non conventional power requirements for sensor arrays, cameras, hydrophones, automated submarine robotic vehicles and the like. How many telegraph channels could the 10 gigabit backhaul to UVic carry?

It is rejuvenating and most enjoyable to see Teleglobe’s two former cable landing stations used for natural sciences especially in these days of growing concern about global warming and sustainable development of the planet; I look forward to see the science produced by Neptune and to stream some ocean views to my laptop screen or my smartphone.