The TAT-14 is a 15,428 km transatlantic submarine cable system, connecting the United States to the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark. The TAT-14 cable system was ready for service on March 21, 2001, and retired on December 15, 2020.
The TAT-14 consortium comprises 11 carriers, namely, AT&T, BT, C&W, Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom, KPN, MCII, PGE, Sprint, Swisscom and Telia.
The TAT-14 cable lands at:
The TAT-14 cable system consists of four fiber pairs, each initially operating with 40 x 10 Gbps DWDM.
Designed with a partial SDH ring protection network structure, the TAT-14 cable system has a initial system capacity of 1.87Tbs calculated as:
Southern route: 41 x 10Gbs channels + 640 Gbs SDH capacity
Northern route: 18 x 10Gbs channels + 640 Gbs SDH capacity
Total = 1.87 Tbs
Now, TAT-14 has a total design capacity of 9.38Tbps upon upgrade with new technology.
In September 1998, KDD Submarine Cable Systems Inc.(KDD-SCS) was awarded the Supply Contract f as the sole supplier for the TAT-14 Cable Network. The Contract Value was approximately US$1.2 billion (Approximately 170 billion yen). KDD-SCS' subcontractors for the TAT-14 cable project included Mitsubishi Electric Corp., TOSHIBA CORP., Ocean Cable Co., Ltd, etc. At that time, KDD-SCS won contracts for large-scale cable systems in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, including PC-1, JAPAN-US Cable Network, and TAT-14 Cable Network, with a total contract value of approximately 300 billion yen. As a result, KDD-SCS toasted to be the top of the world, superseding its antecessors, ALCATEL Submarine Networks (France) and TYCO Submarine Systems (U.S.A.), in terms of contract amount as well as technology.
In May 2011, Mitsubishi Electric signed a contract to upgrade the TAT-14 Cable Network with 40Gbps DWDM technology.
On December 15, 2020, the TAT-14 consortium decommissioned the TAT-14 cable system, making its lifetime of 19 years and 9 months. The TAT-14 is the first trans-atlantic cable to be decommissioned since the Gemini cable in 2003.
In April 2021, Subsea Environmental Services and Red Penguin Associates (advisors) were awarded the contract to decommission the TAT-14 telecommunications cable system, to remove and recycle of shore-ends in the US, UK, France, Denmark and the Netherlands as well as the deep-water segments in the North Atlantic.