The significance of PTAT-1 is that it broke the international telecommunication monopoly held by AT&T Corporation and British Telecom (BT) for telecommunications between the US and UK, and set off the mass production of fiber optic systems that now circle the world.
The UK to US section of the cable was shutdown just after 02:00 hours on 8 February 2004, as it was no longer considered financially viable by Cable & Wireless. Competitors to the cable had dropped their prices drastically after they re-emerged from Chapter 11 Bankruptcy with little or no debts to service, something C&W was unable to compete with.[citation needed][3]
This cable provided intelligent repeaters that counted bit errors which were reported in response to interrogation from a base station. It contained three fiber pairs which were used to provide two active channels. Each repeater included a base station-controlled cross-over data switch to swap traffic through a choice of two fiber pairs, the switch connections in successive repeaters enabled any desired connection to be made and provide a diversity path when required.