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The Coral Sea Cable System (CSCS), being funded largely by Australian Government is replacing the build Huawei was initially planning on building. CSCS is being built by Vocus/Alcatel.
https://www.coralseacablesyste...
https://www.submarinecablemap....

This new cable also has branches to PNG/Solomons (and everywhere else), its being pushed by the same guy who did Hawaiki, which is AU-NZ-US
https://www.itnews.com.au/news...

Actually. no.
Going to CHina would be one of the more expensive routes.
Look at this map. VERY FEW Chinese locations are shared between America, and South Korea. If looking for a 3rd indirect hop, Japan would be far more likely. In fact, it was obviously designed for just that. Multiple links from America go to Japan. In every location that has an American link, also has links to S. Korea.

Not entirely true - ie NZ has it's own direct cables to US via Hawaii, and a few adjuncts along the way that also get us into Asia etc. http://www.submarinecablemap.c...

So what does Guam have going for it?

It is already a fibre hub. http://www.submarinecablemap.c...

It is less than 150 km north of the bottom of a very deep ocean trench. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

It is politically stable because it is a US territory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

All of its internet connectivity runs through the UK, practically the USs 52nd state so fast as the NSA are concerned.

Not quite all of it, there are direct links to Canada & the US. Most of it is through the UK though.

We've got excellent connections to Europe.

looks like you have exactly ONE connection to Europe, and guess where it also connects?

Ocean cables are quite popular, even between places that can be connected over land.

http://www.submarinecablemap.c...

Replace Cisco, and Akamai and then maybe I'll be convinced it's better than the current situation. But it's still oxymoronic service: A central authority that *REQUIRES* trust for people who don't trust anybody.

And what do you do for countries with draconian Cert laws like England? (They want a copy of your root cert)

The resulting entity would have to be incorporated in Iceland or something. FAR away from 5-eye's dragnets.

Good question regarding root certs.

As for Iceland being far away from 5-eyes:
http://www.submarinecablemap.c...
Look at where the Iceland trunks go to -- hint: Canada and England are part of 5-Eyes
That, and the country closest to Iceland is....

There are a mess of cables in the area, http://www.submarinecablemap.c... and I suppose they could but by "right by the bahamas" you're actually talking 1,000-2,000km of cable (depending on whether you went to Jamaica or directly to Caracas). The Bahamas largest project is around 3,500km which hooks up 20 islands and Haiti. Adding an extra 1/3rd to the length/cost just to avoid the US? Political/tourist implications aside, from a financial perspective it doesn't make sense. You have to remember that outside of Nassau/Freeport it's very much a 3rd world country - last I was there the entire island would lose power at least once every couple weeks.

That's missing a few cables -- the Submarine Cable Map has more
(and with the proper names as well)

Yup, it's always been there.

Plenty of people know where all the international fiber endpoints are. I can think of a dozen buildings that if they were isolated, it would cripple Internet service in the US. They don't even have to shut down entire datacenters, only the power in the meet-me rooms. I think DHS can find 2 dozen agents in the US who would go to those buildings, shut down the rooms, and the Internet is gone.

As we've seen before, a problem with just one tier 1 provider can make Internet service crawl. Dropping a few major peering points would effectively shut the whole thing down. It's not even hard to find them, if you've been doing business with them. I've been to a few.

They could probably have it ready to shut down simultaneously with a 30 minute lead time to give enough time for the agents to drive to them. Internet and phones would be dead everywhere in the US, and severely interrupt international use. Any remaining links and private peerings would be saturated beyond use.

There are maps and lists readily available.

http://www.submarinecablemap.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_exchange_points#North_America
http://www.bgp4.as/internet-exchanges
http://www.datacentermap.com/ixps.html

The submarine cable map is insightful.

The idea to add another cable through Hawaii is not obvious. In order to improve path redundancy, going to south america would be a better idea. And at least Brazil could be interested

Wireless gets them some access which is better than nothing but not even close to fiber. Your not going to magic around the spectrum issues .

Yep, it would be much more accurate to say they're leapfrogging past copper - which is a Good Thing. But fibre isn't optional, not even with O3B's MEO satellites in the picture. If you look at the submarine cable map, you can pretty much see at a glance which countries are more aggressive about internet and technology in general, and which ones are being left behind. Fibre is going to be needed in most urban areas, even if it doesn't ultimately consist of FTTH.

For the more visually inclined, a graphical map.

And based on that, I'll give dollars to doughnuts that it's Egypt. Virtually all traffic between Europe and Asia transits through the Suez canal.

I'd agree with this analysis because there were some massive interuptions with middle eastern internet comms when the SEA-ME-WE_4 cable was apparently snagged by ships at anchor of Alexandria. Interestingly, Egypt actually arrested 3 men for cutting though cable off Alexandria in March this year. makes you wonder what they were actually doing.

Yeah, and it wouldn't bee too hard to figure out where this secret location is either. You could just pick likely places from here: http://www.telegeography.com/telecom-resources/submarine-cable-landing-directory/ Gibraltar would be a good guess.

For the more visually inclined, a graphical map.

And based on that, I'll give dollars to doughnuts that it's Egypt. Virtually all traffic between Europe and Asia transits through the Suez canal.

A significant amount of your traffic to the UK and the rest of the world goes through the fiber optic landing site in Halifax. See http://www.submarinecablemap.com/

The brits do it because they can as the majority of high speed transatlantic links land in the UK. Some go direct to France, Germany, Spain etc. but most hit the UK first. And they have always been nosey buggers.

http://www.submarinecablemap.com/

Granted there are a lot of cables going every which way over there. But a lot of the connectivity seems to go via British holdings up to Miami eventually. Or is Venezuela a connectivity powerhouse I didn't know about? I don't see them using their troposphere scattering to Europe but then again, maybe they will just run a shell game on mega? The links are:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECFS_(cable_system)
http://www.submarinecablemap.com/
http://www.indexmundi.com/antigua_and_barbuda/telephone_system.html
http://www.globalcaribbean.net/pages/en/network-system/route-description.php?lang=EN

The Internet is self-healing to the extent that the infrastructure allows. However, Libya only has what, all of three underground cables connecting them to the rest of the world? http://www.submarinecablemap.com/ It's pretty easy to disconnect a country from the global Internet if said country lacks the redundancy of multiple global connection points.