Submarine Cable Map 2023

April 22, 2023 7:11 PM

The company TeleGeography has produced a beautiful, interactive map of submarine cables in 2023. The map depicts 529 cable systems and 1,444 landings that are currently active or under construction.

Downloadable high resolution copies of the maps can be found via links once you've scrolled down far enough. Here's a direct link to a high resolution global map.

posted by Teegeeack AV Club Secretary (28 comments total)

My mind boggles at the whole topic of undersea cables. Like what the hell, a 3000+ km long cable, thousands of meters beneath the surface? That is just totally bonkers to even attempt, never mind succeed at.
posted by aubilenon at 8:07 PM on April 22, 2023 [7 favorites]

Thank you for this.

It looks like Guam is leading in Bandwidth Per Capita.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 8:52 PM on April 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

Has it really been 26 years since Neal Stephenson wrote Mother Earth Mother Board? If you haven't read it, it is a looong interesting article (~40,000 word) on the behind the scenes of wiring the planet with undersea cables back when the internet was undergoing explosive growth.
posted by fings at 8:58 PM on April 22, 2023 [19 favorites]

I came here to recommend "Mother Earth Mother Board" which is one of Kevin Kelly's 50 Best Magazine Articles Ever.
posted by neuron at 9:22 PM on April 22, 2023 [11 favorites]

I have so many questions.
posted by slogger at 10:01 PM on April 22, 2023

My mind boggles at the whole topic of undersea cables. Like what the hell, a 3000+ km long cable, thousands of meters beneath the surface? That is just totally bonkers to even attempt, never mind succeed at.

Like, in 2023 that seems hard but doable. In 1866 though? Madness.
posted by pwnguin at 11:33 PM on April 22, 2023 [7 favorites]

"It looks like Guam is leading in Bandwidth Per Capita."

I came here to say, Guam has a lot more internet cables than I would have expected for a place with only 170k people. And three more are being added in the next two years. And they aren't just cables going from elsewhere to elsewhere that just add in Guam, a lot of them seem to end at Guam.
posted by tavella at 1:25 AM on April 23, 2023

As a map junky and a network engineer this will in no way take up a bunch of my day, not at all.
Thank you! This is super cool!
posted by Cu_wire at 4:59 AM on April 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

This made me, too, revisit Mother Earth Mother Board (non-paywalled PDF). Interesting to think about how much has changed since it was written in 1996; for example, I assume long-distance telephony is less important. But I still see the names of some of the cables he talks about (or their replacements) on the map in the FPP. And this sentence about the Lighthouse of Alexandria jumped out: “The collapse of the lighthouse must have been astonishing, like watching the World Trade Center fall over.”
posted by TedW at 5:06 AM on April 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

What's the deal with the cable from Perth to Sydney? What conditions exists that an probably way more expensive undersea cable is preferred to an overland connection?
posted by mmascolino at 5:57 AM on April 23, 2023

Undersea is way, way cheaper then overland on a project level, even if the cable itself is more costly.

Overland you have to worry local governments, private land owners, running through existing conduits or digging new ditches, and the much higher risk of someone damaging it when working nearby. With a boat, you just spool it out the back like a garden hose-- and it's a chunky ol' cable. If a boat hooked one by mistake near the landing points (a friend hooked the ARCOS link once many moons ago here) it's generally the boat that's got problems, not the cable.
posted by Static Vagabond at 6:50 AM on April 23, 2023 [5 favorites]

I came here to say, Guam has a lot more internet cables than I would have expected for a place with only 170k people. And three more are being added in the next two years. And they aren't just cables going from elsewhere to elsewhere that just add in Guam, a lot of them seem to end at Guam.

Guam is like a transport hub. Very little of the traffic on those cables is destined for Guam itself; virtually all of it is going out on one of the other cables to its final destination.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 9:00 AM on April 23, 2023

Note that Russia has a pretty minimal number of undersea cables reaching it, mostly via the Baltic to St. Petersburg, plus a few on their Pacific coast. (Click on and rotate the globe graphic to view.) Presumably, they have more connectivity overland and via satellite, but it's just another illustration of how far behind they are in tech capability. (Compare with China.)
posted by beagle at 9:01 AM on April 23, 2023

Like, in 2023 that seems hard but doable. In 1866 though? Madness.

It was madness. Whoever thought they should make the longest wire ever made, load it on a paddle wheel steamer, dump it over the side, and expect it to work had to be at least a bit mad. However, I really question the sanity of the person who decided to try it themselves after the first attempt failed. And the second. And the third, IIRC. And none of the early telegraph cables worked very well at all because of stuff they didn't yet know about inductance and capacitance on a couple thousand mile long undersea cable. Worse, they didn't even have a real theory for what the hell was going on to give them trouble yet. At least when it came to the issue of failing insulation they had some idea of how to do better. Not so much when it came to the very, very low keying rates that had to be used to get an intelligible signal across. They ruined the first couple of cables because they thought that the weak signal was because they needed more voltage.

Turns out that when you turn a signal on and off, you're dealing with effects normally only seen in AC transmission, and that didn't exist yet outside of what they were doing, so they were very much fumbling in the dark.

Similar ironies abound in fiber optic transmission systems. All those new hotness fiber specs that were around in the 90s turn out to be worse in total capacity compared to the old stuff because modern signal processing and line conditioning techniques allow engineers to work around the issues in old school fiber, but that doesn't work with the fiber types that were doped with weird shit to reduce dispersion and other effects that were giving them trouble when fiber transmission was basically just lasers making morse code faster.

What blows my mind more than that, though, is how in the last 10 years optical systems have gone from requiring half a rack of shit just to move 25 or 40Gbps over a hundred kilometers to being able to do 400Gbps over the same distance in a pluggable not much bigger than an SFP module. At this point they must be using pure sorcery to make this stuff happen.
posted by wierdo at 10:12 AM on April 23, 2023 [10 favorites]

Overland you have to worry local governments, private land owners, running through existing conduits or digging new ditches,

Just to give an idea of how much fun that can be:

The long-haul links for early American telecom was all run on poles alongside railroad tracks, largely for the reason that easements had already been established. Hundreds of contracts for crossing private land were already in place.

Then someone got the bright idea of burying cables and very shortly all of those hundreds of landowners thought "I'm pretty sure that easement was just for the surface. I don't think it applies to underground."

There were many many lawsuits.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 10:56 AM on April 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

interesting,

Would be really cool to see a connectivity map that looked at average speeds per volume of data from anyplace you selected on the map. how far away from London is New York, datawise, compared to Boise to Chengdu?
posted by eustatic at 11:26 AM on April 23, 2023

Has it really been 26 years since Neal Stephenson wrote Mother Earth Mother Board? If you haven't read it, it is a looong interesting article

...which led me to Arthur C. Clarke's How the World Was One from 1992 which was even better.
posted by Rash at 11:27 AM on April 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

In 1991 my work was analyzing DNA sequences, so we used regularly to receive a copy of GenBank, the database of all the DNA sequences known to science, on a 2400 ft magnetic tape. This was the size of an inch-thick dinner plate and arrived in a padded envelope from France. After downloading the data, the tape itself was sent on to Indiana, then Houston and finally back to Lyon. By mid 1992, we had left 19th century communication behind and were downloading GenBank over the internet. The whole database then was only about 200 Megabytes in size (say, three MP4 TED talks in today’s e-currency) – it’s 1000x bigger now – but the connexion was slow (overnight at least) and unreliable. Traffic was lighter and the connexion accordingly faster and more certain at weekends. All too often, however, I’d come in on Monday morning to find that only a fragment of the database had arrived together with a laconic “BROKEN PIPE” error message – which evoked an image of packets (technical term for an aliquot of data) of As Ts Cs and Gs spewing out across the Atlantic seabed. So I took to going into town on Saturday or Sunday to check progress and start it all again if the process had failed. This was conscientious but tedious, and I was delighted when, foraging about in the basement at work, I found an acoustic coupler and brought it home. You could plug the coupler into a computer and telephone at home and send commands to the server at work albeit at less than the speed of light – maximum 300 bytes/sec. The phone handset sat into a foam-rubber surround to minimize noise and maximize signal but you could still hear it fizzing and clicking. With that appropriate technology, from home I was able to . . . C H E C K P R O G R E S S at work and R E S T A R T J O B if necessary. This was – marginally – quicker than making a 25km round trip on my bike.

Over the next few months and years it got easier - the wires got fatter, connexions more reliable. Perhaps more importantly, Genbank got too big to download locally at about the same pace at which it became possible to do all the necessary analysis off site on what we were still years from calling The Cloud. It became possible because capable graduate students and tech-savvy post-docs across the globe were writing code to abstract particular sequences from the database and analyse them in particular, and even peculiar, ways.

Now here's the weird, I was in the pub before Christmas ten years ago [2012] talking to a couple of the young effectives in our world of bioinformatics. One of them said that he was routinely communicating with his US collaborators by FedExing a terabyte external hard-drive back and forth across the Atlantic. Parkinson's_law states that "work expands to fill the time available for its completion". If there isn't already a similar law like "data proliferates to fill to capacity the conveniently accessible means for storing it" then I hereby claim/name it as Bob's Law of the Data Packet.

Was it the Red Queen or Madame de Pompadour who quipped about surfing the deluge to keep abreast of it? I forget. "Apres nous la brioche" was it? "Surfing’s the source code man . . . swear to God"? Now that was Bodhi in Point Break.
posted by BobTheScientist at 11:57 AM on April 23, 2023 [6 favorites]

In 1991 my work was analyzing DNA sequences, so we used regularly to receive a copy of GenBank, the database of all the DNA sequences known to science, on a 2400 ft magnetic tape

I just finished today a podcast on the role of genomics research, focusing on the EU and UK, and one of the guests claimed they were on some days they were the biggest source of outbound traffic from the country.

One of them said that he was routinely communicating with his US collaborators by FedExing a terabyte external hard-drive back and forth across the Atlantic. Parkinson's_law states that "work expands to fill the time available for its completion". If there isn't already a similar law like "data proliferates to fill to capacity the conveniently accessible means for storing it" then I hereby claim/name it as Bob's Law of the Data Packet.

This is definitely a thing and I'm sorry to say its likely to be more attributed to Tannenbaum than "BobTheScientist" unless that Bob is like, Bob Metcalfe, and he already has his own eponymous law.
posted by pwnguin at 1:57 PM on April 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."
–Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 2:24 PM on April 23, 2023 [4 favorites]

Huh, I remember it as "station wagon full of mag tapes" (or one word "magtapes"?) but I long since gave that book away.
posted by inexorably_forward at 7:24 PM on April 23, 2023

pwnguin . . . they were the biggest source of outbound traffic from the country.
Woot, in the mid 90s I was famous for fifteen minutes in this way. For my sequence analysis pains, I was put i/c of a big server connected to the internet - without any training about how to run a server, let alone a secure server. One afternoon I got a call from the university's head of IT congratulating me for being a net contributor to traffic. Peripheral pre-Celtic Tiger Ireland was usually sucking information in from elsewhere. National Networks had notice a spike of outgoing traffic which was traced to the university and then to my server and wanted to find out what was so valuable in Dublin.

I'd ignorantly set the FTP server to allow anyone to upload files and some bright spark had deposited a selection of pirated software there and announced its availability to the world. Big red face, me.
posted by BobTheScientist at 10:43 PM on April 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'm wondering, how do they deal with deep trenches? I assume they aren't draping the cable all the way down to the bottom of the Marianas trench, but if they are going to Guam from the eastern Pacific it seems impossible to avoid some kind of deep trench.
posted by tavella at 11:50 PM on April 23, 2023

Back on topic after me-derails: BBC undersea cables impact wildlife. Providing a hard attachment surface in silty areas, for example.
posted by BobTheScientist at 12:14 AM on April 24, 2023

I'd ignorantly set the FTP server to allow anyone to upload files and some bright spark had deposited a selection of pirated software there and announced its availability to the world.

And kids the world over rejoiced!
posted by wierdo at 4:13 AM on April 24, 2023

The political map that the cables are overlaid on has some interesting ideas. It looks like all the Russian troops have to trek across Egypt to get to Ukraine.

A good book about the physical development of cabling and the internet is "A Series of Tubes", which looks at how the internet got built out. It's a bit out of date - it predates the rise of cloud computing, but still, solid work.

On land, most of the early communications infrastructure was run across railroad right-of-ways (sometimes by the rail companies - Sprint was an offshoot of Southern Pacific Railroad). A side effect of this is that because the railroads didn't go across Native American lands, they're having a hell of a time with the "middle mile" rather than the usual "last mile" problem in getting bandwidth to people.
posted by rmd1023 at 6:33 AM on April 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

I used to live on top of a landing point. Literally! When I moved from Taipei to the seaside town of Toucheng, I noticed the grim industrial Chunghwa Telecom building next door had no employee cars or scooters parked in the lot. The neighbours didn't know what the building was for, though one granny cautioned me that I could not pay my mobile phone bill there.

I later figured out it is the landing point for all fibre on the east coast of Taiwan, partially because there's a military base down the road. Digging into some English language sources, I discovered the physical connections were under the water and ran at least partially under the apartment building I lived in. My partner and I figured if China decided to invade Taiwan, they'd hit that terminal hard in the first minutes of the invasion, so at least we'd have a quick hot death.

For fun, I once went for a swim directly across the likely underwater cables. In my memories I can feel the concentrated enthalpy beneath my breaststroking torso, but it was probably just the minnows that liked to hang out near the breakwater. Locals surfed there occasionally, when the waves were right. The name they gave the area translates to "Stinky Water" because the old fishing harbour used to leak oil slicks and fish guts in that direction before they rebuilt the harbour.
posted by Enkidude at 8:57 AM on April 24, 2023

Came to draw attention to “The Pentagon’s New Map” which postulated that if you could connect to the internet you likely wouldn’t start wars with others on the internet because you have a functioning economy. It held up ok at the time. I’m not convinced it’ll hold up forever.
posted by Farce_First at 10:00 AM on April 24, 2023