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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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Guam is a hub because it's a US Terrority centrally located in the Pac Ocean. It's not like the people in Guam have 1000-count fiber into thier houses, it's just a landing facility.. much like
Re: SA->Africa: Someone(s) wanted it enough to pay/bond it.. so it got built.. *shrug*
----- The internet has given everyone the ability to have their voice heard equally as loud.. even if they shouldn't be
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.
US Navy routinely tapped Soviet and likely still taps Russian Federation undersea communication cables.
This is the boat that most likely does it
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Jimmy_Carter_(SSN-23)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells
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
What is the point of laying something like that?
Connecting to the rest of the world through a European telecommunication company instead of an American one? The point is it was probably cheaper.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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!
If you're referring to ATLANTIS-2, it's a cable connecting South America to Europe, and the specific routing is because it's paid for by a consortium of companies from Argentina, Brazil, Senegal, Spain, and Portugal. By crossing the Atlantic where it does, it takes a route that minimizes the amount of deep-water cable needed.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
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.
The routes are (a) made from sources publically available on the internet, and (b) not accurate enough to find from the map.
Even if they did know where a cable was, they're buried a meter deep in the ocean floor until they get into deep sea. The terrorists can't even make a set of exploding underpants, they're not going to be able to sabotage the cables!
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
Good read! Operation Ivy Bells is most interesting. I guess that's why they frown on people in financial trouble for government jobs.
Chance favors the prepared mind.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
Guam is simply a conveniently located switching point. A lot of capacity from Australia, for example, goes up to Guam, because it can then be split out and placed on one of the many US-Asia pipes across the north Pacific. Data can turn 'left' to go to Japan/Asia, or hang a right to go to North America.
This means a company can build a cable from Australia to Guam and then make use of the huge capacity to both Asia and the US from there. Multiple destinations for a single cable, compared to dedicated cables to Asia and the US separately (which do exist as well, and have better latency, but are obviously more expensive to build).
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.
ALL LIES!