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Submarine Cable Map
- tomgallard 15y agoIf you find this interesting, I can highly recommend Porthcurno Telegraph museum in Cornwall (UK). http://www.porthcurno.org.uk/ http://www.porthcurno.org.uk/ Its where many of the first underseas telegraph cables came ashore, and was a hub for the British Empire's telegraph network. It was later dug deep into the rock to protect it during WW2. A great day out- highly recommended.
- leeoniya 15y agothis network is probably the 8th man-made wonder of the world. it makes the Great Wall of China seem benign by comparison.
- kijin 15y ago> seem benign by comparison. So, this network is malicious by comparison?
- marshray 15y agoHow about 'disruptive' by comparison?
- jerf 15y agohttp://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/benign http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/benign , definition 3b: "having no significant effect : harmless" The least common usage of the term, true, but perfectly valid. (Probably going to be "archaic" in another 50 or 100 years.)
- verelo 15y agoI've always wondered where they are. Can you imagine just how long it took to wrap a wire around the whole world a few times over? The thing that shocks me is how recently these were added. I was checking out the cables in Australia, expecting them to have been added in the 60's or something....however most are around the year 2000-2010.
- mikeocool 15y agoYeah, I was thinking the same thing, almost all the transatlantic cables seemed to have been laid in the 2000s as well. I ran across this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telecommunications_cable http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telecommunication... Seems like each cable generally only has a life of 10-20 years.
- kijin 15y agoHmm, then what happens to outdated cables? Do we pull them up, or do we just turn off a switch at the shore and leave the rest in the ocean? Do the cables contain any substance that might pollute the seabed as the casing degrades away?
- dmd 15y agoProbably, but we dump orders of magnitude more crap (both in volume and in hazard) in the ocean every day. Plus, the impact from burning the fuel it would take to have a ship pull up a cable would be thousands of times worse than anything the cable might do.
- marshray 15y agoI'm sure they're left in place. I can't imagine what materials they would be made of that would be particularly harmful. My sense is they're mostly constructed of things like rubber, plastics, other polymers, steel, copper, and of course a little glass fiber.
- derda 15y agoGiven the high price of copper I would guess that they pull the copper cables out after service. I am not so sure about fiber cables.
- miahi 15y agoGiven the cost of such an operation, I don't think you can get some profit even if they were made of gold. As time passes, most of the cable is buried deeper and deeper under debris that falls on the ocean floor. This means that you cannot just pull it up, you would have to dig to get it out.
- kbrowne 15y agoIt's getting kind of dated now, but Neal Stephenson's "Mother Earth Mother Board" is great reading if you're interested in both the history and the process of laying submarine cable: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html
- jonnycowboy 15y agoHacker tourism, in 1996! That's something which I think would be popular now, "Lonely Planet's Hacker Guide to World Travel" detailing hackerspaces, interesting infrastructure tours, 1 or 2 day workshops/courses, low-cost travel and couchsurfing, etc...
- troymc 15y agoIt's not exactly what you outline, but The Geek Atlas by John Graham-Cumming lists many places that would fit the description "hacker tourism." It's a travel guide... but it's published by O'Reilly! http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596523213.do http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596523213.do
- jonnycowboy 15y agoA good start, thanks for the link!
- maxhaot 15y agoCheck the landing visually http://cryptome.org/eyeball/cable/cable-eyeball.htm http://cryptome.org/eyeball/cable/cable-eyeball.htm
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- gk1 15y agoFor anyone curious as to how they're actually laid, here's a simple diagram of a typical cable layer ship (CS): http://www.murmanchanin.ru/shipnoise/polar_king/polar_king.jpg http://www.murmanchanin.ru/shipnoise/polar_king/polar_king.j... And a simplified diagram of how it operates: http://www.fiberinc.net/images/sea.jpg http://www.fiberinc.net/images/sea.jpg
- bicknergseng 15y agoWhat's amazing to me is that these cables were laid without a lot of fanfare. Seems to me if I were Level1 or whoever else and had just completed a 10,000 km cable across an ocean, I'd make sure the press release saw some circulation. The same thing with satellite launches. I feel like these are fairly major feats of engineering that go basically unheard of unless you're in certain small circles.
- onemoreact 15y agoPeople laid undersea cables for telegraphs and back then it was a big deal. However, it's been 154 years and people stopped being impressed a while ago. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telegraph_cable http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telegraph_cable
- sausagefeet 15y agoIt's so weird because I think it's such an impressive feat and one of those things that I feel should be technically really challenging yet it was done so long ago. Sometimes I learn things and am shocked because I either thought accomplishing the thing would be easy and it turns out to be insanely hard or vice versa. This is the latter.
- saulrh 15y agoModern telecoms cable is some amazing stuff. These days there's no metal in the entire cable. Instead, it's all lasers through glass fiber, and when the signal attenuates, it gets boosted by passing through sections of doped fiber that lase using power from another beam, adding power to the signal. And we can do this just as easily as the people back then dropped telegraph cable. For me, at least, there's always something to be impressed by.
- adulau 15y agoAnother map that is quite complete (more older cables) too: http://www.cablemap.info/ http://www.cablemap.info/
- dpcx 15y agoIs there anything like this for landlines?
- trimbo 15y agoHere's what an endpoint looks like.. one of "America's Best Kept Secrets" in this Wired Photo gallery: http://www.wired.com/culture/art/multimedia/2008/01/gallery_simon?slide=10 http://www.wired.com/culture/art/multimedia/2008/01/gallery_...
- RobertKohr 15y agoAnyone know how to get the gray/white land/ocean view in google maps. I want to use it for another project.
- Stratoscope 15y agoUse the Styled Maps options in the Maps API: http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/javascript/styling.html http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/javascript/st... See the mapStyles object in the submarine map source code for the settings they are using. You can use this interactive page to experiment with map styles: http://gmaps-samples-v3.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/styledmaps/wizard/index.html http://gmaps-samples-v3.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/styledmaps/...
- squeed 15y agoI'm surprised at how well connected Australia is. Why is their internet still so expensive?
- pavel_lishin 15y agoPerhaps because it costs money to lay cables. I was talking to an astronomer the other day who mentioned that they're trying to set up a big distributed radio-astronomy rig out in the desert. One of the consequences is that this thing is going to be producing a ton of data - I think he mentioned on the order of petabytes-per-second. So they're trying to work with the Australian government and Telcos to defray the costs by offering the connection as a service, as well. So the cost could drop, soon. Or it could just be offered as a $300 MEGA-SKYLINK-INTERTRON.
- steveh73 15y agoThere's only 2 connections to the USA at the moment, and SCC charges monopoly prices. There is another AU<>NZ<>USA connection being built in 2014 and another AU<>NZ connection built in 2013 (the 2 grey lines). Southern Cross already dropped their prices 44% in response.
- rmc 15y agoPrice is usually not set at "Cost + Profit %" (this is called the Labour Theory of Value), instead organisations charge what the market can bear.
- troymc 15y agoWow, there are two cables running from northern Norway to Longyearbyen, on the island of Svalbard! According to Wikipedia, "Longyearbyen has approximately 2,060 inhabitants (at the end of 2007..." The total population of Svalbard is not much more. Edit/Add: The cable length is 2,714 km.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- russss 15y agoThe reason for that is there's a an important satellite ground station on Svalbard - it's in an ideal place to communicate with polar-orbiting satellites: http://www.ksat.no/node/77 http://www.ksat.no/node/77 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Undersea_Cable_System http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Undersea_Cable_System
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- alexqgb 15y agoPhotographer Christian Hougue produced a really beautiful series on this ground stations called Arctic Technology. He mentioned that the air is some of cleanest in the world, which is a real boon to the equipment they're running. http://www.soulfood.no/arctic_technology.html#img/arctic_technology/01.jpg http://www.soulfood.no/arctic_technology.html#img/arctic_tec...
- omegant 15y agoCertainly great pics!, There is only missing some AT-ATs and storm troopers in some of them...
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- falcolas 15y agoI found it absolutely fascinating how some continents use underwater cables to connect different locations within a continent (Africa, notably, seems virtually surrounded), while others seem to only have significant outbound connections (North America, Australia). I can only guess it has more to do with whether you cross national boundaries (since even the US has underwater cables bridging the mainland to Alaska) than land features.
- jleader 15y agoI would assume it has more to do with how many intermediate places within the continent you want to connect to. If you're connecting two cities on the African coast, and there's really no infrastructure in-between that needs (will pay for) connection, and the roads in between are poorly maintained, it's probably more economical to go by sea. Someplace like the US, if you're running cable from say Boston to NY, first of all, you also want to wire up all the towns and cities in between, and you've got interstate highways so your service trucks can easily get to all parts of the cable, you've got existing utility tunnels you can use, etc. In that case, going by sea is an unnecessary expense.
- miahi 15y agoIf you take a look at an Internet penetration map[1] you will see that most of the cables around Africa have only a few big "customers": Morocco, Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa. If you compare that map with a GDP map you will also see why: poor countries, without terrestrial infrastructure and some with unstable political situations. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Internet_Penetration.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Internet_Penetration.png
- deathToCanibals 15y agoOf course telecom's is generally broken up by country, and most countries with a coastline have at least one undersea cable.
- rmc 15y agoBefore some of the recent cables East Africa mostly had to get by with satillite internet. That wasn't fun.
- abruzzi 15y agowow...Mercator Projection!
- Stratoscope 15y agoWell, strictly speaking, it's not the usual Mercator projection, but the "Google Mercator" or "Spherical Mercator" projection, EPSG 3857 or EPSG 900913. This is a Mercator-like projection that assumes the Earth is a sphere instead of an ellipsoid. Many online mapping systems use this projection because it is a much simpler calculation than than a more correct Mercator projection would require. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_projection http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_projection http://docs.openlayers.org/library/spherical_mercator.html http://docs.openlayers.org/library/spherical_mercator.html
- shimonamit 15y agoI see no cables actually get routed through the Suez canal, even though many cables come up the Red Sea. The same is true for the Panama canal. Is it because they are too shallow? Maybe too concentrated?
- Jtsummers 15y agoI think it's due to accessibility and the way the canals work. The Panama canal itself is actually a series of waterways connected via gates. Allowing ships to be raised and lowered as they need to change elevation. I doubt that'd be very suitable conditions for laying cable. Far easier to make connections to land based routes on either side of the isthmus.
- sbierwagen 15y agoAs the Stephenson article linked elsewhere in this thread says, cablelayers hate and fear shipping lanes. Anchors kill underwater cables dead. Additionally, canals have to be dredged fairly often, which are similarly incompatible with seafloor communications cables.
- samstave 15y agoI want to know what optics they are using. On segments that are 7,000 miles long - are there active optic splice boxes along the length of the cable? Or are they using lasers that actually push 7K miles?
- jleader 15y agoThe diagram of the Polar King cable-laying ship that gk1 posted here shows a "repeater stack" near the holds full of cable. I assume the repeaters are spliced into the cable as it's being laid. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_communications_cable#Optical_telephone_cables http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_communications_cable#... describes the repeaters in a modern submarine telephone cable, and says: "The optic fiber used in undersea cables is chosen for its exceptional clarity, permitting runs of more than 100 kilometers between repeaters to minimize the number of amplifiers and the distortion they cause."
- samstave 15y agoThat means that in a ~7K mile cable run, they have ~110 repeater stacks. Wow, that's a lot. I am still interested in who's optics/equipment are in those repeater stacks and how they power them.
- tomkinstinch 15y agoThey are "powered" by lasers themselves. No electronics involved; excess energy from a pumping laser boosts the intensity of the data laser, using sections of special doped fiber. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_amplifier#Doped_fiber_amplifiers http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_amplifier#Doped_fiber...
- samstave 15y agoMagic, got it. But seriously, that is damn cool - while I have been in IT/networking for a long time - I was not aware of "pumping lasers" as everything I have done, even in designing massive fiber cable plants have all been for relatively short distances.
- kahawe 15y agoI know this is incredibly childish and probably impossible given the elasticity of the cables laid out BUT I would really like to tug on a submarine cable or even just a thread that goes from Euroland over to the USA and have it move and wiggle over there. And then next up: a submarine miniature tunnel/hose/pipe to send a small little vehicle across. I can't help it.
- cynwoody 15y agoYou might enjoy reading about Operation Ivy Bells: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells
- kahawe 15y agoThank you for the link, that was interesting - though until the very end I was hoping some tugging on the cable gave it away... :)
- kenrikm 15y agoThat's so awesome, I remember seeing a special on the Discovery Channel years ago (10+) on how they laid cable for the phone lines I would love to see how it's done now and how it's connected to backbones etc..
- dotBen 15y agoThink about how many of these cables are tapped by governments, and the technology + skill needed to implement that tapping.
- grahammather 15y agoWhy are there so many cables to Alaska?
- ceejayoz 15y agoI'd imagine military installations play a role. Radars and monitoring stations, plus the military bases.
- dpcx 15y agoProbably something to do with the HAARP research: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Frequency_Active_Auroral_Research_Program http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Frequency_Active_Auroral_R...
- apendleton 15y agoAlaska has the combination of having a lot of coastline (more than the contiguous US) and lots of cities that aren't easily accessible by land. Most of southeast Alaska's cities (including the capital) have no roads in or out at all, but are on the coast, so undersea cables are the only practical means of providing connectivity.
- muriithi 15y agoI cannot help but salivate at the dense links connecting US/Europe and US/Asia. Here in Kenya we only have 3 cables. Since last week the internet has been very slow after the main cable was severed by a ship anchor. The second cable seemed to have problems upstream so all the traffic has been routed to the third cable. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/feb/28/east-africa-internet-access-anchor http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/feb/28/east-africa-inte...
- PaulAnunda 15y agofellow Kenyan here! (in the US though)
- takameyer 15y agoLast night I was curious about physical wire connections across oceans for communications. So I started researching and learned about the first ocean line implemented in 1858 for telegraph communication. Seeing this link on the top of HN today was pretty much exactly what I was trying to conclude my research with last night. What a strange coincidence.
- spoiledtechie 15y agoInteresting how you don't see cables going through Cuba or North Korea...
- spoiledtechie 15y agoExcept Guantanamo of course...
- matthavener 15y agoSiboney appears to be a good distance from Guantanamo Bay.
- jarek 15y agoFor North Korea specifically, an undersea cable doesn't really make sense anyway. Geographically, you're better off serving as a conduit between mainland and the tip of the Korean peninsula rather than getting your own underseas. Geopolitically, your current ally shares a land border with you, and their side of the border is an area strategically fairly important to them and so it is likely fairly well connected.
- Stratoscope 15y agoHere's a 1901 version of the map: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/1901_Eastern_Telegraph_cables.png http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/1901_East... And somewhat related, a wonderful book called The Victorian Internet: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0802716040/ http://www.amazon.com/dp/0802716040/ If you ever wondered whether the Internet really is a "series of tubes", here are the tubes: http://www.popsci.com/files/imagecache/article_image_large/files/articles/tubes.jpg http://www.popsci.com/files/imagecache/article_image_large/f... That photo is from an interesting article (by my namesake James Geary) about undersea cables: http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-03/who-protects-intrnet http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-03/who-protects-i... Enjoy! :-)
- alastairpat 15y agoThe two linked popsci.com pages are both giving 404 errors for me – are you able to find a working link? They look interesting! (Technically speaking, the web server is returning 200 OK, but it's 'Page Not Found')
- Stratoscope 15y agoHmm... Not sure what could be wrong there. The links are both working for me. I wonder if anyone else is getting the 404 errors?
- mastorrent 15y agopopsci.com seems to be redirecting for Australian-based IP addresses. Fails for me in Sydney, but works from my US-based VPS. This is the image: http://i41.tinypic.com/zx05kw.jpg http://i41.tinypic.com/zx05kw.jpg and the Wayback Machine has the article: http://web.archive.org/web/20101231014805/http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-03/who-protects-intrnet http://web.archive.org/web/20101231014805/http://www.popsci....
- alastairpat 15y agoThanks very much – I am indeed trying from Australia. Seems insane that they're breaking URLs in an attempt to serve us 'local' content.
- wtvanhest 15y agoMombasa Submarine Cable disrupted by anchor. (sort of unrelated but related). http://www.globalpost.com/dispatches/globalpost-blogs/weird-wide-web/internet-connection-disrupted-east-africa http://www.globalpost.com/dispatches/globalpost-blogs/weird-...
- jarek 15y agoAs a Canadian, this map worries me from a sovereignty perspective.
- sbierwagen 15y agoPay for your own cables, then.
- jarek 15y agoOh, absolutely. They wouldn't be very sovereign if we built some and didn't pay for them.
- bnewbold 15y agoIt's unfortunate that TeleGeography, while on the one hand demonstrating beautifully how closely connected many of us have become, seems at the same time to collaborate with BlueCoat, a company that helps censor the content coming down these tubes on a national scale. This mash-up paid for by... ? http://www.telegeography.com/products/commsupdate/articles/2011/10/11/blue-coat-systems-sponsors-the-state-of-the-global-internet-webinar/ http://www.telegeography.com/products/commsupdate/articles/2...
- jyturley 15y agoFor anyone interested, here is an excellent quora post on how undersea cables are laid out on the ocean: http://www.quora.com/How-are-major-undersea-cables-laid-in-the-ocean/answer/Faisal-Khan-1 http://www.quora.com/How-are-major-undersea-cables-laid-in-t...
- bdunbar 15y agoAm I the only reader who was disappointed that there is no thick line of undersea fiber leading to the island of Kinakuta in the Sulu Sea?
- adriand 15y agoWhile reading a bit about these cables I found this unusual fact on Wikipedia: > Because the [TAT-8] cable was the first fiber optic cable and not coaxial cable, the electrical interference shielding for the high voltage supply lines was removed. This removal did not affect the fiber, but it did cause feeding frenzies in sharks that swam nearby. The sharks would then attack the cable until the voltage lines killed them. This caused numerous, prolonged outages. Eventually, a shark shielding was developed for the cable. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TAT-8 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TAT-8
- bane 15y agoInteresting factoid, Sharks have a fairly unique sense that most animals don't, they can sense fairly faint electrical fields that living creatures produce (electroreception) that they use for "targeting" their amazing jaws, finding prey hidden in seafloor sand, and possibly even navigating in Earth's magnetic field. This is especially important when they are about to attack some prey. Due to the structure of their jaws that actually unhinge and push forward during an attack, they lose sight of their prey and use this sense to hone in their bite. I remember watching video from an experiment where Sharks were fed live fish and raw meat, and the sharks kept missing the meat but almost never missed a live fish. Here's a video of one confused by an artificial electrical field. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aYPHeK1Tyo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aYPHeK1Tyo
- giardini 15y agoWould not many of these be military targets in case of a war? What failover capability does the USA have?
- rdl 15y agoBefore a shooting war, like during te USA USSR cold war, militaries and intelligence agencies put a lot of effort into tapping one another's undersea cables. The trick is doing it without being detected, especially on a fiber cable. Operation Ivy Bells was one of the most documented.
- ilitirit 15y agoI remember working on the application that was used for administering the SAT-3/WASC cable. At the time I was excited because I knew it meant South Africa would be getting faster internet pretty soon after that. 5 years later I was still stuck on a 56k modem. ADSL launched about two years before that, but it was just way too expensive. At the moment I'm paying about $185p/m for a shaped (20kbps between 7am and 7pm during the week) uncapped 8mbps ADSL line.
- mgkimsal 15y agoTwo random thoughts: 1. I'm always amazed that anchors can seemingly hit a cable at the bottom of the ocean floor. Given how hard it usually is for us to find anything on the ocean floor with any precision, we seem to be able to drop anchors and cut cables with surprising accuracy. 2. Do the cables have slack in them to account for continental drift? I don't know how much we drift, but I'd imagine over time the cables would need some slack in them to make up for it.
- hobbes 15y ago1. The beach, where my 5-year old paddles in the water, is also the ocean floor. Can get fairly shallow.