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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.
...but I recall Neal Stephenson's article on undersea cables was very interesting.
That is obviously where the secret UFO base is located.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Undersea_Cable_System
Its capacity is used by NASA, the United States Department of Defense, the European Space Agency, UNIS and others.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Up there? That's the department for keeping track of who's been naughty, and who's been nice.
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.
Svalbard is an island in the Arctic Circle, with no permanent population.
There are over 2000 permanent residents that disagree :)
It explains everything in the Wikipedia link shown right in the "More Information" section on the map...
"The earth/ground station on Svalbard is a key site for collecting remote sensing data from polar orbiting satellites, such as those from NOAA, due to its close proximity to the north pole."
But even if it was an easy answer, it was one I didn't know existed, so I'm glad you asked it ;)
And those residents need their porn. And lots of it!
It's not like they can go outside and not freeze to death or anything
--- As to make my comment seem, by comparison, more intelegent... doodie doodie doodie poop poop poop!
Looking through the presentation archives of the NANOG meetings ( http://www.nanog.org/presentations/archive/ ) has some great stuff on undersea cables and also ISP peering, etc.
Someone else already posted it, but Neal Stephenson wrote a great article on just that subject a few years back (okay, over a decade ago - but still very good and interesting). You can find it here.
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.
You gotta figure the naughty proportion of the bandwidth is over 90%.
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
just like the rest of the internet.
... 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
5TB does seem a bit excessive, but perhaps it handles a little bit more then just GPS. Or maybe they figured if they're running wires they might as well put room for growth?
The latter. Only 20 Gb/s is actually used - the rest is dark. But when you're running a 1300km stretch of cable, you may as well throw some extra in there. Far more cost effective than having to do it again in a few years.
Not quite ... including all the publically available information I can find (from that map and other sources), Australia's current international undersea capacity is comprised of:
JASURAUS – 5Gbit/s
SEA-ME-WE-3 – 960Gbit/s
PIPE-PACIFIC-1 – 1.92Tbit/s
AUSTRALIA-JAPAN-CABLE – 1Tbit/s
GONDWANA-1 – 640Gbit/s
SOUTHERN-CROSS – 2.4Tbit/s (2 paths, in a ring, 2x 1.2Tbit/s)
TELSTRA-ENDEAVOUR – 1.28Tb/s
Total capacity: 8.205 Tb/s
That capacity is not all lit either - it's enough for the current level of demand. The main issue with internet in Australia is actually the price of domestic transit rather than international (capacity to the US is cheaper per Mbps than domestic capacity).
In anticipation of the nationwide NBN FTTH network which is currently under construction (and which will no doubt massively increase demand for capacity), further cables are under construction ATM. Most importantly the PACNET cable (Australia-US) which is due to be completed in 2013 with a massive 12 Tbit/s capacity (i.e. it will overnight more than double our total international bandwidth).
Anyway either way, a 5 Tbps cable to Svalbard certainly does seem pretty 'overkill'!