Naming Ceremony C.S. Cable Venture Certification Ephemera & Medal Immingham.

Very rare, may be the only one in existence

Cable Venture was formally known as Neptune 3

Purchased by Cable & Wireless in 1975 who undertook a major refit which included converting four of the holds into cable tanks providing storage for 2400 nm of 1 inch coaxial cable or 1300 nm of 1½ inch cable or 900 nm of the new 1.7 inch cable. The fifth hold was used for the storage of buoys, grapnels etc.

Adjacent to the four tanks was space to store 500 repeaters and equalisers. These were fed to the aft Dowty linear engine via a trolley running in a suspended trackway down the port side.

The conversion was carried out at Immingham by the Humber Graving Dock and Engineering Company, and the ship was renamed Cable Venture. The naming ceremony, carried out by Princess Alexandra, took place on the 18th April 1977 and the vessel entered service in August. In 1980 the ship underwent a major refit which included the fitting of a new stern chute, cable plough and associated equipment.

Ship for a new generation

cs Cable Venture, the latest addition to the Cable and Wireless fleet, has the largest cable carrying capacity of any cableship afloat. One of her most important assets is that she is equipped to lay 1.7" diameter new generation cable. She is a ship for a new era in telecommunication development.

Her spacious enclosed working deck can store 500 repeaters and equalisers, more than were needed for the whole of the Cantat-2 transatlantic cable. She has tanks sufficiently capacious to accommodate enough one-inch light weight cable to span the North Atlantic in a single laying operation.

In size, sophistication and

adaptability she is one of the foremost specialist ships of her era. Her particular specialisation is as a layer of deepwater high capacity telecommunication cables.

cs Cable Venture has a complement of 35 officers and 83 crew with accommodation for more than 20 cable

specialists and representatives. She has an approximate gross tonnage of 10,000 and a speed

of 14 knots.

There is an affinity between

es Cable Venture and one of her most distinguished predecessors, Brunel's Great Eastern.

The Great Eastern was one of the technological marvels of the 19th century. When she laid the first successful transatlantic cable in 1866 she opened the way to a period of enormous submarine cable development which was to result in a global telegraph network.

Just as the Great Eastern was range. able to take part in the introduction of revolutionary telecommunication technology of the second half of the 19th century, the Cable Venture is designed for innovative submarine cable systems of the last quarter of the 20th century.

But here the analogy between.

The Great Eastern marked the threshold of the old system. The first telegraph message tapped out over the historic cable she laid between the United Kingdom and North America went at a laborious 16 repeater carrying capacity, has words a minute.

cs Cable Venture, with her

vast cable tanks and large

been specially modified and Cable Venture is designed as a

equipped to lay 1.7" diameter cableship for a fresh generation of submarine cable telecommunication technology where the concept of a cable carrying more than 15,000 simultaneous telephone conversations is a very real

new generation cables.

The first transatlantic telephone cable, laid in 1956, had a capacity of 36 voice circuits. The early part of the 1970's saw systems laid which were capable of carrying 1,840 simultaneous telephone conversations. More recently cable has been laid which considering the time it would

carries up to 4.000 voice circuits. Cable Venture is able to lay the most modern cables of the decade which can carry up to 5,520 simultaneous telephone conversations. But more than that, with the

ability to lay systems of the next generation, she looks forward to a future in which experts are already talking of cables with voice circuits which go well into the five-figure number

the capability and significance of the two great ships ends.

possibility. The massive increase in system capacity can be illustrated by