Maps of global telecommunications
January 31, 2013 8:00 PM   Subscribe

telegeography.com has a nice gallery of zoomable maps of global telecommunications and IT infrastructure, such as submarine cables (1 2), and internet backbones.
posted by carter (9 comments total) 21 users marked this as a favorite
 
Neal Stephenson wrote a serialized piece for Wired in 1996 titled Mother Earth Mother Board, which goes deep into the history and technical triumphs of global telecommunications infrastructure. I don't think Wired has published a finer piece on wires since. Or any at all, for that matter.
posted by vendaval at 8:20 PM on January 31, 2013 [7 favorites]


Mother Earth Mother Board is still very much relevant. The optical terminals and routers on each end have changed a great deal since 1996, but the OSI layer 1 process of deploying thousands of tons of cable with huge ships is not significantly different than 15 years ago.
posted by thewalrus at 8:42 PM on January 31, 2013


Yes, excellent companion for this, thanks vendeval!
posted by carter at 8:44 PM on January 31, 2013


I really liked "Tubes : a journey to the center of the Internet" by Andrew Blum. It covers most of the Internet's physical infrastructure, which I found fascinating.

And I always thought that Stephenson's article would have made a great coffee table book.
posted by Marky at 8:54 PM on January 31, 2013


That old style map of the under sea cables is HUGE.
I did not know there was that much cable down there.
I thought there was just a hand full of major connections.
posted by quazichimp at 11:24 PM on January 31, 2013


Wow, for the connection between Asia and Europe it looks like the backbone runs right through Egypt near the border with Israel. I'm gonna assume someone thought this out.
posted by crapmatic at 11:32 PM on January 31, 2013 [1 favorite]


Somewhat related
posted by Hello, I'm David McGahan at 1:12 AM on February 1, 2013


Wow, for the connection between Asia and Europe it looks like the backbone runs right through Egypt near the border with Israel. I'm gonna assume someone thought this out.

Well, if you're a telecom company that doesn't want anyone to mess with your cables, and you need to run them through that part of the world, running them along a canal every major world power cares about protecting makes good sense.
posted by UrbanEye at 9:56 AM on February 1, 2013 [1 favorite]


Wow, for the connection between Asia and Europe it looks like the backbone runs right through Egypt near the border with Israel. I'm gonna assume someone thought this out.

Well, there were a lot of existing tunnels there already.
posted by Kabanos at 11:00 AM on February 4, 2013


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