Slashdot Mirror
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.
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 :)
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.