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Undersea Cable Map Shows Where The Data Pipes Are
overThruster writes with a report from TechCentral that "Greg Mahlknecht has built a free map showing the world's submarine telecommunications cable systems. The map, which took Mahlknecht several months to complete, is free of charge and will remain so.'" (At least until it gets shut down as a security threat.)
This looks very similar to the maps of the undersea telegraph and telephone lines from around a hundred years ago. See, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1901_Eastern_Telegraph_cables.png This shouldn't be that surprising since the basic idea of the technology (large underwater cables to transmit information) is the same, the population centers a hundred years ago are not that far off from the population centers today, and the geoological constrains are similar also.
Wasnt there a successful tapping of an underwater pipeline some time ago? ..of course its a security threat.
So it is a series of tubes. I knew it.
Svalbard is an island in the Arctic Circle, with no permanent population. Why does it have a 5TB cable terminating there?
Sometimes I doubt your committment to SparkleMotion!
...but I recall Neal Stephenson's article on undersea cables was very interesting.
"In the mid-1990s, the NSA installed one such tap, say former intelligence officials familiar with the covert project. Using a special spy submarine, they say, agency personnel descended hundreds of feet into one of the oceans and sliced into a fiber-optic cable." If you have the resources to do that i bet you can get the maps either way...
Is there no cable to Antarctica? Hmm... (type, type, click, click) ... Oh, I see:
Antarctica is the only continent yet to be reached by a submarine telecommunications cable. All phone, video, and e-mail traffic must be relayed to the rest of the world via satellite, which is still quite unreliable. Bases on the continent itself are able to communicate with one another via radio, but this is only a local network. To be a viable alternative, the fiber-optic cable must be able to withstand temperatures of -80 C as well as massive strain from ice flowing up to 10 meters per year. Thus, plugging into the larger Internet backbone with the high bandwidth afforded by fiber-optic cable is still an as yet infeasible economic and technical challenge in the Antarctic.
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_communications_cable
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
"Cable is a schematic representation of the connectivity. Path might not be geographically accurate, and branching configuration is a best-guess."
Is buying a Harley Davidson as your first motorcycle since you were 16 at age 49 a midlife crisis issue?
Interesting where it shows cables making landfall. In the Los Angeles area, it shows Diablo Canyon nuclear plant and Hermosa Beach. I was pretty sure the cable coming in south of LAX made landfall through ShitPipe, 4 miles north.
How do they lay out these cables? Are they on the bottom or floating & anchored? Are there repeaters? Anywone know where I can read about it?
Guam is like some sort of data hub, eh?
What is that weird cable from Argentina snaking all the way around and across to Africa? What is the point of laying something like that? Seems like a lot of cable just to make that one dedicated connection.
Who is this Greg Mahlknecht? He's just a random guy doing this as a hobby, which means he has no particular propreitar/secret inside information from AT&T or some other. It would be trivially easy to anyone that has the resources to tap a underwater comms line to just build this map from the same source data, summarized as follows in TFA:
Mahlknecht has drawn his data from a variety of sources. “Wikipedia has a ‘submarine communications cables’ category and I used this as a starting point before going to each cable’s homepage and gathering alternative information."
Another note is that this data is very general. It's generally straight lines from landing to landing. You couldn't take this map or the KML data he's pulled together, send a submarine down straight from some point on the map and be able to spot the cable. It's going to take some work.
By my count it looks like there is a total capacity of about 30 Tbps between the U.S. west coast and Japan, and only about 20 Tbps between the east coast of NA and all of Europe. Seems strange given the relative distances.
From TFA: (At least until it gets shut down as a security threat.)
Looks like it's already been slashdotted, so they won't need to.
...that the transAtlantic cables land on Hudson Street in NYC. If the 9-11 cocksuckers had been smart, they would have blown that up instead.
Cool map but it is missing some. SEA-ME-WE-2, the Southern cross(listed on the side but not on the map) FIJI needs high speed internet too! The ADEN-DJI crossing the mouth of the gulf of Aden, I could go on. Point being that there is a LOT of undersea cables, this map shows some.
Yikes. I worked in West Africa for a few years, and we dreamed about the day when SAT-3 would bring us more than a couple of satellite T1s. Next year, they are getting over 10Tbps capacity, and almost more importantly, it's coming in separate, redundant cables.
It's hard to imagine what that's going to do.
Now, if they could only keep their cable landings and their terrestrial infrastructure working.
In europe and north america the cables come accross the sea and then land at a small number of places.While in africa, the middle east and other underdeveloped areas they tend to follow the coast with loads of landings. It would appear that in these areas undersea cables are being used as a substitute for land based infrastructure because countries don't trust their neighbours.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
This was a childish thing to do, in the same registry as "Look, no hands!". Now terrorists know where the comm pipes are. Sometimes it is better to think before you act.
It has more bandwidth running through it than Hawaii. Is that for the world's largest K-Mart?
He has successfully replicated the same map I get from telco carries over couple of years. WAY TO GO!
I seriously doubt that there are that many Romanians on here right now. If you're trying to find some, I'd check here first.
And the price for best connected island goes to... Guam! If you zoom satellite view in to the north-western airport, you can see at least four B52s. And the main road is called "Marine Corps Drive". I guess those guys need a lot of porn.
What security threat? You don't need a map. Just cruise the coast looking for signs that say DO NOT ANCHOR OR DREDGE. The US military figured that out decades ago.
And no you can not make them more secure by not putting up those warning signs because someone will anchor or dredge and cut the cable.
... but the cablemap app was really annoying, it slowed Firefox down like hell, and there was no way (that I could discern) of easily seeing the whole world map at a high resolution, so I made some screen caps and put them together in Photofiltre. I gave the author credit in several places on the map.
http://db.tt/UEjKBo5
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Where is Canada!?!
Read the map. Most of the cables are schematics. It doesn't show where the cables -are-, it just shows how the points are connected.
Geeze,, and I complain about running cable two rooms away..
Basically a bunch of fat pipes heading straight down to SA, and a series of drops at random locations on the way.
... Basslink too! Fantastic. What a great resource.
The most obvious changes for me are the development of Guam and Hawaii as hubs of the pacific, where in the telegraph world Hawaii was an outpost and Guam wasn't on the map. Otherwise, it's surprising how similar the two maps are, even the level of development around the coast of Africa, which, although greater now was surprisingly developed in the telegraph world.
Amazing - Svalbard gets huge internet. Right off the coast of Los Angeles CA is Catalina Island. Beautiful place. I heard their internet speed was that of the 1990's
No underwater pipe to the island.
Unbelievable.
ALL LIES!