Segment B extends from West Palm Beach, Florida to Magens Bay in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands.
Optical amplifiers use lasers to boost communications signals along a cable route.
This results in the use of fewer electrical components than conventional repeater systems. To date, high-speed communications experiments have been conducted and recorded in specially designed laboratories. The experiment quadrupled the transmission capacity of the system, which normally operates at 2.5 billion bits per second. As the lightwaves travel long distances, they become weaker and also broaden and lose their shape, so they need to be regenerated or boosted every 40 miles or so. Conventional fiber-optic systems include a repeater system of electronic regenerators that convert the photonic signal to an electronic one, retime and reconfigure it, reconvert it to photonics, and retransmit the signal.