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Submarine Cable Map 2021
- yboris 5y agoA classic essay on this topic: Mother Earth Mother Board by Neal Stephenson https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/ https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/
- smiley1437 5y agoThat is my favorite Wired article written by my favorite author at that time in my life, and right around the time when the internet started to gather steam, brings back a lot of nostalgia
- fatbird 5y agoI will never forget: "Hey, how much does that satphone cost?" "Who gives a shit?"
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dylanz 5y ago"Vietnam veteran Doug Shaftoe, the son of Bobby Shaftoe, and his daughter Amy, do the undersea surveying for the cables and engineering work on the haven, which is overseen by Goto Furudenendu, heir-apparent to Goto Engineering". My all time favorite book.
- qubex 5y agoCryptonomicon.
- rasz 5y agoIn similar vein I enjoyed 1994 Neal Stephenson “In the Kingdom of Mao Bell” article in the Wired about CT2 (DECT like cellphone technology) deployment in China/Shenzhen. Even had obligatory “Snow Crash’s Neal Stephenson Visits Shenzhen” magazine cover tag line. Article text: https://www.wired.com/1994/02/mao-bell/ https://www.wired.com/1994/02/mao-bell/ Full magazine scan: https://archive.org/details/eu_Wired-1994-02_OCR https://archive.org/details/eu_Wired-1994-02_OCR “Even people who carry cellphones carry pagers, which confused me until I found out that most of the cellphones I was seeing aren’t really cellphones at all; they are CT2 phones, which are cheaper and operate over a much shorter range. On a CT2, you can call out but you can’t receive calls, so you have to carry a pager. To cover a metropolis with CT2, tens of thousands of base stations would be needed. Coverage in Shenzhen is still spotty. When you see half a dozen young men loitering on the front steps of a building shouting into their prawns, you know there must be a CT2 station inside.”
- smiley1437 5y agoWow wow wow thank you for linking this! Never read it before, and besides being a fine example of Stephenson’s writing it is quite prescient considering what’s happened in HK
- FredPret 5y agoGaia’s nervous system - under construction by her monkeys in boats
- colordrops 5y agoNaw this is humanity's nervous system. Gaia's is more subtle and interwoven within the ecosystem.
- AngeloAnolin 5y agoThis is a very well written / designed visualization. Very informative.
- hrdwdmrbl 5y agoExcept on mobile!
- IAmGraydon 5y agoWow this website works remarkably poorly on mobile.
- tacoman 5y agoIt's interesting that the west coast of Canada only has one cable and it's to connect to Alaska.
- timeinput 5y agoSimilarly I was surprised by the "Gulf of Mexico Fiber Optic Network". It's apparently operated by BP for offshore gas and oil drilling
- failwhaleshark 5y agoIt seems like W .CA should have links to Seattle-Portland-SF-LA-San Diego, Russia, Japan, and China.
- xfalcox 5y agoSo the EllaLink cable was inaugurated this week, connecting Brazil to Europe in less than 60ms of latency, instead of the 200ms we have today. Any ideas how can I track the progress of each ASN in using it?
- jauer 5y agoYou can’t really tell who is using a cable without access to quite a bit of contractual data. Cable capacity is generally leased as strands, then subleased as waves, then someone leases L2 circuits on top of that. Not like L3 where you can run a traceroute or whatever, though I wonder if you could determine possible cables based on latency…
- PaulAJ 5y agoYou can pick up clues from router names and domains. For instance if I try traceroute riotimesonline.com I can see routers with "telehouse" in the name (telehouse being the big London interconnect), then a couple of "atlas.cogentco.com" routers, one of which ("lon13") has 10ms ping, and the next ("bos01") has 77ms ping. The next hop seems to be to Amazon Data Services in Boston, so presumably the riotimesonline.com site is being served by AWS out of there, or at least it is for people not in Rio. That tells you who is leasing the transatlantic service. Unfortunately I can't instantly find a web server in Rio to ping.
- neurostimulant 5y ago> connecting Brazil to Europe in less than 60ms of latency Wow that would be awesome when it's fully operational. I sure hope we in the southeast asia region had that kind of latency to both europe and america (both are around 200ms from here).
- xfalcox 5y agoIt's crazy to think that northeast Brazil is closer to Portugal than Miami!
- kortilla 5y agoI want 8 ft tall maps for my wall that I can rotate through. Does anyone recommend somewhere to get A) a submarine cable map of this size and B) other geographical maps of this size? I don’t care about super high quality paper but I do want lots of detail so it’s fun to lose yourself in.
- Firerouge 5y agoHow about a globe you can spin on your desk? Bonus points for individually illuminating lines based on your current internet traffic.
- nixass 5y agoI have one map from the time when I worked in AWS, it has all the undersea cables displayed (the state as of 2018.) and is about 2x1.5 meters in size. Cool stuff to have hanging on the wall in the home office.
- chrisseaton 5y agoNote that the detail like the routes is made up so you’re not really getting anything out of it if you blow it up.
- mixmastamyk 5y agoLooks like the one they talked about over the Arctic wasn't built yet? London to Tokyo or similar?
- timeinput 5y agoI wonder how they'd draw that on a mercator projected map.
- mixmastamyk 5y agoBig arcs are the typical way, this one used flattened lines however.
- billfruit 5y agoThe map controls seems not working on mobile.
- mkl 5y agoI don't think they work on desktop either. It seems to be just a static image in the background rather than an interactive map (despite the apparent zoom buttons).
- lwansbrough 5y agoThis is a UX nightmare on mobile. I always thought it would be a good action movie plot to follow what would happen if a malicious group intentionally disrupted these connections.
- njacobs5074 5y agoOr a nature documentary. It's only been in the past few years that we're more than a random fault or shark attack away from losing most of our bandwidth to the rest of the world...
- BugsJustFindMe 5y ago> This is a UX nightmare on mobile. Not just on mobile.
- stinos 5y agoThis is a UX nightmare on mobile. Just on everything. It adds zero usability or information, it just hinders reading. Normally I just try to ignore things like this but now this got me wondering: I assume at some point someone convinced someone else this was a must-have, a deal was made, things were implemented, money spent. Would such person/group honestly believe this is better (and in what way) than a static site? Or would this rather be a more calculated move like being able to charge/earn more because it takes longer to implement?
- TheSpiceIsLife 5y agoThere's also that aspect of building, or creating in general, where if you have more tools, which are easily accumulated on a computer but also in a workshop or creative studio, you'll tend to find a use for them. I've often found myself in the midsts of a caffeine binging thinking: I've definitely over complicated things for myself here. In a similar way that the job isn't finished in the workshop until you've cleaned up, overly complicating software has a long tail too.
- stinos 5y agoThat's a good point actually. I've had my fair share of complete overkill designs in the past myself. Once I learned the problems it creates years later in large codebases I actively try not to do that anymore though. And to fix the earlier mistakes. Which is also fun: it's not uncommon to fix issues and even implement new features, yet end up with a diff showing more lines deleted than added.
- lgats 5y agoThe Map: https://submarine-cable-map-2021.telegeography.com/images/Submarine_Cable_Map_2021_Global-b4c3dc93170c8dd869e9489d917cb1ec.jpg https://submarine-cable-map-2021.telegeography.com/images/Su...
- belter 5y agoThanks for the link. The resource is great but the UI is insane.
- koheripbal 5y agoI wish I could order large print of maps like this. I honestly think they make for great decor when framed in the office.
- michaelmcdonald 5y agoYou are in luck since they sell them as a 36x50: https://shop.telegeography.com/products/2021-submarine-cable-map-free-shipping https://shop.telegeography.com/products/2021-submarine-cable...
- smlss_sftwr 5y agoTalk about Baader-Meinhof, was just wondering last night how my messages get routed to friends and relatives overseas. Fascinating find, thanks for sharing
- mikewarot 5y agoThere doesn't seem to be anything across the North Pole, yet.
- failwhaleshark 5y agoSanta steals WiFi from Russia. Although, the damn reindeer keep visiting naughty hoofed ruminant sites on their iPads, clogging the limited bandwidth.
- punnerud 5y agoFor mobile view, use the «Free download» links on the bottom of the page. Links here for convenience: Global: https://submarine-cable-map-2021.telegeography.com/images/Submarine_Cable_Map_2021_Global-b4c3dc93170c8dd869e9489d917cb1ec.jpg https://submarine-cable-map-2021.telegeography.com/images/Su... America: https://submarine-cable-map-2021.telegeography.com/images/Submarine_Cable_Map_2021_Americas-d744d8bb589c65cf5674e6356bbe40e1.jpg https://submarine-cable-map-2021.telegeography.com/images/Su... Asia Pasific: https://submarine-cable-map-2021.telegeography.com/images/Submarine_Cable_Map_2021_Asia_Pacific-a6fbd23ef38474671ee9e8fb7508010f.jpg https://submarine-cable-map-2021.telegeography.com/images/Su... Europe: https://submarine-cable-map-2021.telegeography.com/images/Submarine_Cable_Map_2021_Europe-e652bd669638d811c2e015eb87ad8608.jpg https://submarine-cable-map-2021.telegeography.com/images/Su... Middle East: https://submarine-cable-map-2021.telegeography.com/images/Submarine_Cable_Map_2021_Middle_East-0aa983dfc2383ed5df8e9af245084468.jpg https://submarine-cable-map-2021.telegeography.com/images/Su...
- femto 5y agoIt would be interesting to have a similar map for submarine power cables. It's early days, but the power grid will eventually go global too.
- jacobwilliamroy 5y agoHow does one transmit power across an ocean? It seems like we are just barely able to send DC across the English Channel with our current technology. Does a global power grid involve super lasers? Or some kind of huge plasma cannon?
- pony_sheared 5y agoWe're currently crossing seas, not just the channel. Nice little map with stats here: https://www.nationalgrid.com/our-businesses/national-grid-ventures/interconnectors-connecting-cleaner-future https://www.nationalgrid.com/our-businesses/national-grid-ve... A few years ago I saw a talk by an industrial chemist, long distance power transmission over carbon nanotube cables. Looks like they're still not ready for primetime. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_nanotubes_in_interconnects?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_nanotubes_in_interconne...
- femto 5y agoHVDC can go much further than across the Channel. Suncable is scheduled to go live in 2027. It will connect Australia with Singapore (3350km), the plan being that Australian solar arrays will provide 20% of Singapore's power. The current longest is 2500km [2] inside Brazil. [1] https://suncable.sg/ https://suncable.sg/ [2] https://www.power-technology.com/features/featurethe-worlds-longest-power-transmission-lines-4167964/ https://www.power-technology.com/features/featurethe-worlds-...
- ben_w 5y agoOne thing I keep wondering when I see maps like this: Are they a physically accurate representation (e.g. of how separated the North Atlantic cables get), or are they symbolic representations (e.g. like the London Underground map)?
- jl6 5y agoIt’s in the FAQ: “Are the submarine cable paths shown the actual route taken by the cables? No. The cable routes on our map are stylized and do not reflect the actual path taken by systems. This design approach makes it easier to follow different cables and discern their landing points. In real life, cables that cross similar areas of an ocean take similar paths. These paths are chosen after comprehensive marine surveys that select routes to avoid hazardous conditions, which could potentially damage a cable.”
- ben_w 5y agoThanks! I honestly can’t even find their FAQ even now I know they have one…
- sleavey 5y agoSimilar to https://openinframap.org/ https://openinframap.org/.
- Keyframe 5y agoWhat's the loop above Darwin, Australia about? It doesn't make sense.
- neurostimulant 5y agoCould it be connected to some offshore oil rigs in that region? There doesn't seem to be any islands in that area, but if I'm not mistaken, that part of water is an oil and gas producing region.
- seb1204 5y agoI was also wondering where in Oxford Falls the cables land. Oxford Falls is a small suburb north of Sydney and it is ... Inland and high up. There are multiple satellite dishes from Optus, Telstra and others in Oxford Falls on Oxford Falls Rd but then there are the Oxford Falls falls and other suburbs before it reaches the ocean.
- femto 5y agoMining [1] worth $160+ billion per year. There are mammoth automated iron ore mines in that area [2], with railways to Port Hedland [3]. No doubt their communications links follow the railway alignment to Port Hedland, then join the undersea cable to Darwin, then back to head office. The extra loop heading north is probably the Greater Sunrise gas fields. [1]https://www.vocus.com.au/why-vocus/our-network-and-expertise/north-west-cable-system https://www.vocus.com.au/why-vocus/our-network-and-expertise... [2] https://im-mining.com/2019/08/06/pilbara-leads-way-haul-truck-automation/ https://im-mining.com/2019/08/06/pilbara-leads-way-haul-truc... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Hedland,_Western_Australia#/media/File:Iron_ore_Pilbara_2.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Hedland,_Western_Australi... [4] https://www.woodside.com.au/what-we-do/international-developments-marketing-and--exploration/timor-leste https://www.woodside.com.au/what-we-do/international-develop...
- gassit 5y agoIt’s just offshore oil and gas platforms. Major iron ore has its own rail track and fibre network. There is no reason for it to loop around, cables are two directional.
- perihelions 5y agoWhy are there submarine fiber cables to ultra-remote islands with barely any population? How do the economics work to make that happen? Apparently NASA funded the Svalbard cable [0] because it supports a satellite ground station. The St. Helena government contracted a branch of a Google cable [1], in part, "to attract Digital Nomads to live and work on St Helena" (an HN thread discussed this aspect [2]). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Undersea_Cable_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Undersea_Cable_System [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Helena#Internet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Helena#Internet [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20503330 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20503330
- walrus01 5y agoSvalsat earth station and kongsberg satellite services (a pretty big defense contractor) are on svalbard. Lots of critical DoD and earth observation stuff is in polar and SSO orbits. As for other submarine cables to medium size islands, it's a calculation based on a Telco, that until the advent of o3b, might have been paying $300,000 a month for geostationary transponder space. And the much fatter pipe that is fiber. In some cases partially government subsidized as an essential thing since remaining 100% dependent on satellite is a bad thing if you can afford to avoid it.
- thinkingemote 5y agoIn regions of gas or oil rigs and high marine traffic, many of these ultra remote locations are for mobile internet.
- elygre 5y agoThe island of Røst, off to the north west of Norway, has about 500 inhabitants, a subsea cable, and a remote controlled airport. I don't know if the cable is a hard requirement, but I imagine it is helpful to ensure stable airport operations. https://avinor.no/en/avinor-air-navigations-services/services/remote-towers/ https://avinor.no/en/avinor-air-navigations-services/service...
- failwhaleshark 5y ago- Pork projects - Underserved communities investments - "Build it, and they will come" (as mentioned) - Strategic purposes - Incidental to running drops to other destinations - Rich people wanted it ($50-800 megabucks)
- cycomanic 5y agoApart from the sophisticated communications technology that goes into achieving maximum throughput through these long distances, is the power supply of the cables. These cables have an optical amplifier every 50-100km which are supplied by DC power supplied through the protective metal armor around the fibres. Now if you think about it, what is ground if you have a cable between continents? There is no such thing as global ground, so there can be potential differences between of thousands of Volts. Another one, how do you repair a broke cable that lays at a depth of 500m? TLDR, you bring both ends to the surface and splice a 1km of new cable between them. There are some videos from subcom (former TE subcom) on YouTube.
- comboy 5y agoCan you elaborate on the ground cable? I mean as shielding it should work regardless of what you described here, right? And regarding voltage between these two points, why would it be so high? And wouldn't it go down to 0 quickly after connecting the cable?
- cycomanic 5y agoSorry what I meant is that if you just connect to the ground on one continent you might have a huge potential difference, compared to the ground on the original continent. So if you would want to run your system on e.g. 100 V you need to make sure that the relative difference between your two end-points is 100 V and that voltage is unrelated to the voltage to ground at either endpoint.
- s334 5y agoIs there an equivalent for inland cables.
- kzrdude 5y agoI can't really figure out how the color coding of cables work. And I'm also wondering how we experience bandwidth shortage, if there is, just congestion, slow links?
- throw0101a 5y agoNANOG has some good presentations on optical. "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Optical": * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKeZaNwPKPo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKeZaNwPKPo Also "Demystifying Submarine Cables": * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pk1e2YLf5Uc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pk1e2YLf5Uc "Tutorial DWDM & Packet Optical Fundamentals Troubleshooting the Transmission Layer: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dum8UXtbN3o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dum8UXtbN3o APNIC has "DWDM & Packet Optical Fundamentals: How to troubleshoot the Transmission Layer": * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOgTU80YTDI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOgTU80YTDI For long distance (>100km) transmission, searching for the keywords "coherent optics" is useful.
- failwhaleshark 5y agoI noticed: - Australia needs more global connectivity. IIRC, data transiting outside of AU is relatively expensive. - China needs more connectivity, especially with the US for e-commerce (AliExpress is very slow). - SE Asia mostly has a great deal of connectivity. - India, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and France are well-connected. - Iceland has 4, soon to be 5, links. - St. Helena, Kiribati, Rurutu, Tubuai, and rural Canada along the Hudson are getting drops soon. - There's no connectivity from the central southern US to Central/South America, it all goes through Florida.
- zamadatix 5y agoRemember this is a "submarine cable map", there are land fiber paths as well e.g. through Mexico. That being said going over to Florida is the shorter path for most of the central/southern US as Central/South America is farther East than most imagine. AliExpress being slow is more likely a function of latency due to distance than connectivity or bandwidth. On bandwidth remember these lines represent cables, not the amount of bandwidth on the cable. 1 high capacity cable may be easily worth 100 of another on this map. On connectivity remember, much like South America being farther to the right, if you look on an actual globe instead of a flat projection the fastest path from China to the US is to go up to Japan not directly across the Pacific so adding connectivity there would not help. As with most maps this map is missing many current and upcoming cables. E.g. I'm pretty sure Iceland has an additional submarine path or two not accounted for here. For land maps I've never seen anything remotely close to being complete (no fault of the map makers, most of the data just isn't accessible).
- vitus 5y ago> Australia needs more global connectivity. IIRC, data transiting outside of AU is relatively expensive. > China needs more connectivity, especially with the US for e-commerce (AliExpress is very slow). To both of these points, yes and no. - Population of Australia + NZ is about 30M people. While that's not nothing, 30M people don't require the same scale of deployment as serving India, or the US / Canada / Mexico. - How much traffic to/from China is there in practice (given the Great Firewall, so it's largely unidirectional)? Pinging aliexpress.com, I get ~100ms latency from US East Coast. From mtr, it turns out that I'm being served out of Germany ("alicloud-ic338528-ffm-b1.ip.twelve99-cust.net"; Telia uses ffm to denote Frankfurt). So latency to/from China is actually irrelevant here. If you want to serve users faster, you need to invest in content delivery (whether that's buying from Akamai or other players in the space, or building out your own, as AliExpress has done -- I have a much lower ping to img.alicdn.com, which serves me out of New York). CDN usage also lowers egress bandwidth costs, since you use transit links less (cachefill is expensive but infrequent compared to fetches from cache). Either way -- higher latency dictates lower steady-state throughput; that said, most requests are short and dominated by start-up costs from e.g. TCP handshaking (especially in the world of larger initial congestion windows), so if you have +100ms latency, that's very visible in terms of flow completion time. To some of your other points -- SE Asia has a lot of connectivity because it's one of two ways into India (the other way around the world goes through the Middle East, which is fraught with geopolitical tensions). Iceland is a convenient landing point en route to northern Europe. The other way to get from south-central US to South America is through LAX->SCL (Los Angeles -> Santiago, Chile).
- wcchandler 5y agoIs there a land based version? It’s always interesting to find out when random carriers have a large fiber run nearby.
- PEJOE 5y agoMy father was one of the inventors of the undersea fiber optic cable, and joined many of the cable laying missions, including the original Australia mission and several japan missions. (I forget the cable names) Our house growing up was full of cable segments, superconductors, lasers, and microscopes. I remember one day he brought home a $100,000 microscope that had been thrown away, which I proceeded to use to look at banal things like leaves and insects, but was designed to look at the ends of cut fibers. Anyway, its incredible to me how much these cables have transformed the world, and how invisible it is to all of us. Imagine if trans-continental communication relied on satellites? The global internet we have today would be much more isolated, with fiefdoms based on proximity. For those interested in a fiber science story: He once was asked to calculate the rate of seawater diffusion into glass, which he and the team found ridiculous, but I suppose it was unknown if water could soak into glass in an appreciable way over long periods of time. (Water is an important impurity to try and control) How would you measure such a thing? There's no good way to increase the rate of diffusion of water into glass, but what you can do is make fiber with excess water in the core, and heat the fiber while measuring the diffusion of water out of the core into the outer portions of the fiber. Then simple rate relations imply the rate of diffusion at sea floor conditions. I believe the result was that you would see a 1% increase in the water concentration in the fiber over a period of 10,000 years. So his instinct, that it does not matter, was incredibly correct. I hope nobody else has ever had to repeat such a measurement!
- bilater 5y agoThe UI is so well done! I wonder how the effect of zooming in on certain portions of the map when you scroll to certain sections is achieved. EDIT: I used it on desktop so it works well for me but can see how mobile users would be less than impressed.