
Submarine Cable Map 2014 - bhaumik
http://submarine-cable-map-2014.telegeography.com/#
======
analyticsjam
I spent a few years supporting these from the financial end. Modern cables are
built in a loop so that they automatically fail-over. For instance, most
Trans-Atlantic cables have pops in New York, Florida, England, and mainland
Europe. If there is a cut in one segment, traffic automatically switches to
the other.

Most customers these days are also on products that mux across these cables.
So, if your Trans-Atlantic cable has two simultaneous outages, your traffic
would automatically route itself across the Pacific. Your latency would go up,
but your service would continue.

When I was there, construction was beginning on SMW-4, which had the dubious
honor of being the first billion dollar cable. They are typically incorporated
via international treaties between states and companies that are roughly about
100 pages long. Each partner has to cover maintenance on the part between the
main cable and their drop, while everyone chips in on the main part.

It really is fascinating; outages are typically caused by boat anchors close
to shore or large earthquakes. Once a guy in Hawai'i cut the Southern Cross
wire with a pair of clippers while doing yardwork.

~~~
MichaelGG
So if someone can cut them with their clippers by accident, certainly a
malicious actor could wreak tons of havoc? Why does this not seem to occur?
Even from a juvenile "hey I turned off the Internet lol" kind of level?

~~~
ChuckMcM
As I recall there have already been cases of cutting cables to move traffic to
other cables which have better monitoring capability. But as for the lulz, I
expect that even the most naive of folks who might do this understand that it
would get them some serious prison time, and there would be a huge amount of
effort put into catching them and making an example out of them. Not quite
worth it I'd expect.

That said, we've had folks take sniper shots at power substations in
California[1], which can cut power to big chunks of real estate.

[1] [http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_26419083/pg-e-
substat...](http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_26419083/pg-e-substation-
san-jose-that-suffered-sniper)

------
stevewilhelm
I recommend 'A Thread Across the Ocean: The Heroic Story of the Transatlantic
Cable' by John Steele Gordon. [1]

From description,

"But in 1866, the Old and New Worlds were united by the successful laying of a
cable across the Atlantic. John Steele Gordon's book chronicles this
extraordinary achievement -- the brainchild of American businessman Cyrus
Field and one of the greatest engineering feats of the nineteenth century. An
epic struggle, it required a decade of effort, numerous failed attempts,
millions of dollars in capital, a near disaster at sea, the overcoming of
seemingly insurmountable technological problems, and uncommon physical,
financial, and intellectual courage."

[1] [http://amzn.com/0060524464](http://amzn.com/0060524464)

~~~
gimboland
Also very enjoyable, and somewhat shorter (though still very long): 'Mother
Earth Mother Board' [1], Neal Stephenson's essay on the laying of the FLAG
cable, and related history.

[1]
[http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html](http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html)

~~~
jfoutz
That was such an amazing article. I still remember how long that story and how
engaging it was. IIRC that issue of wired was like 20 pages thicker than the
rest. Somewhere Stephenson talked about being grateful to Wired for not
cutting it down to a 6k length. I still tell people the part about the library
of Alexandria interconnect.

Great story about the internet's adolescence.

------
RankingMember
It still amazes me that we laid giant bundles of cabling at the bottom of the
ocean and they're as reliable as they are.

~~~
justincormack
Especially given the first one laid in 1850 failed within hours
[http://atlantic-cable.com/stamps/Cableships/indexstc.htm](http://atlantic-
cable.com/stamps/Cableships/indexstc.htm)

~~~
bladedtoys
A subsequent attempt was made by the Great Eastern* which, in my humble
opinion, is the coolest ship ever conceived.

*[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Great_Eastern](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Great_Eastern)

~~~
easytiger
Isambard Kingdom Brunel was not a man to faf around was he. He never even got
to see her sail her first journey as he died of a stroke. You've done a lot if
you've died at 53 and achieved as much as he did.

------
arc_of_descent
Does each cable actually lie at the sea bed? What if the route comes across a
really deep part of the ocean?

~~~
mvleming
This long article from Wired in 1996, Mother Earth Mother Board [1], would
answer your question. It is long, it took me more than a couple of hours to
read, but it's also my all-time favourite article from any magazine, and
whenever the topic of submarine cables comes up on Hacker News I often see
this link.

[1]
[http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html](http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html)

Edit: Also, it's written by Neal Stephenson for whatever that's worth.

~~~
pchristensen
Yeah, I'm the MEMB fairy, sprinkling that link in the comments of any story
about submarine cables. But you beat me to it this time!

I consider it my small contribution to the world to make sure as many nerds as
possible get to read that story.

~~~
jschulenklopper
Any other (long) articles you recommend, for the people that have read the
story (now or earlier before) and enjoy more of that?

Kevin Kelly maintains a great list at [http://kk.org/cooltools/best-magazine-
articles-ever](http://kk.org/cooltools/best-magazine-articles-ever).
Apparently he likes David Foster Wallace...

------
hcarvalhoalves
It's interesting to see how much politics weight on the connections. E.g.:

1\. There more connections between USA and UK than to non-english speaking
European countries.

2\. Venezuela is the only country connecting Cuba.

3\. Brazil connects with Cape Verde island and will connect with Angola,
another portuguese-speaking country. Those will be the only connections
crossing south Atlantic.

4\. Southern Asia connects to Europe circumventing the Middle East by
connecting to Egypt and then crossing the mediterranean.

------
corv
Also good: [http://cablemap.info](http://cablemap.info)

~~~
lorenzfx
Since the position of many cables differ strongly in both maps (their position
is obviously sketched rather roughly) I wonder what the real position of those
cables is? (or if this information is secret)

~~~
cbr
It's not secret: cables appear on navigational charts so you know where not to
put down your anchor.

------
rbanffy
When a telco hired me (they were the owners of the portal I worked for) I got,
as a gift, a book with beautiful maps detailing where their fiber network,
down to street corner level. I called it the Modern Terrorist Manual.

With that book in hand (and I don't know how many copies were actually made)
any resourceful bad guy could knock off about 60% of Brazil's phone and data
network.

~~~
cgusto
Yes, it is scary when you realize how susceptible some of this infrastructure
is.

Reminds me of an instance in 2009. I was working in Santa Cruz, CA. I was
configuring some of our servers remotely, when suddenly I lost internet
connection. The whole office was out. VoIP was down - no signal on my cell
phone as well. I went to the front desk and tried the land line. No dial tone.

This was weird.

I saw a few people from other offices milling about the courtyard. I went
outside. They were all experiencing the same thing. A few of us went to
Starbucks. Couldn’t buy coffee because their registers were down.

At this point, people were starting to leave their offices in droves. Santa
Cruz PD actually began to have a few officers walk around the area, since no
one could make phone calls.

The only thing that worked was Verizon cell phones. These were being passed
around so people could make calls (data did not work however).

All in all, this lasted about 6 hours.

This was caused by a single frustrated former ATT employee. He just went in
and clipped some fiber lines and left.

[http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2344762,00.asp](http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2344762,00.asp)

~~~
Scoundreller
I'm a little surprised Starbucks wouldn't just revert to cash mode? Who cares
about exact prices when everyone involved knows that each items costs no more
than a few cents. Just round to the nearest dollar, and any competent manager
would reward such behaviour given the alternative.

At least this is my experience with pharmacy billing. If we couldn't put
claims through due to network problems, we'd just estimate based on your
previous claims and keep things humming along.

~~~
bdunbar
> I'm a little surprised Starbucks wouldn't just revert to cash mode?

The register - I speculate - is also tracking inventory. Ring up two
cappuccinos and a pastry, corporate keeps track and knows what and when to re-
order.

Getting the inventory out of whack might be worse than loosing trade during
the outage.

------
bladedtoys
I wonder do they just drop the transatlantic cables blindly over the mid-
atlantic ridge and hope for the best or check that it's not a hot spot or
something.

And four cables connect Alaska to the lower 48? I wonder why.

~~~
japhyr
I live in southeast AK. An earthquake near Glacier Bay this month broke one of
the undersea cables, which caused an outage for customers of one service
provider. I had no idea there were multiple cables to southeast, until I read
about the response to this incident.

The Capital City Weekly has a good article about the recent incident, which
also includes a short history of communication cables in Alaska [0]. Basically
a few companies built seabed cables in southeast during the dot com boom, and
then there was too much capacity for a while. One company went bankrupt and
another company attempted to buy all the capacity, but concerns about a
monopoly prevented that deal from going through. Now when there's an outage,
companies can lease access from each other until the broken cable gets
repaired.

The currents in our coastal channels are significant, with 8-12 foot tidal
swings. Those currents, combined with the silty and rocky nature of the ocean
floor in much of southeast, makes for a pretty abrasive environment. Add to
that a lot of bottom fishing and anchoring, and cables get broken.

As a resident of southeast, I'm happy for the redundancy!

[0]
[http://www.capitalcityweekly.com/stories/081314/new_12153949...](http://www.capitalcityweekly.com/stories/081314/new_1215394948.shtml)

~~~
bladedtoys
I wonder why they didn't just lay them along the alcan highway? Surely that
would have been a zillion times cheaper.

~~~
bzbarsky
[http://gregorio.stanford.edu/holbrook/CableCosts.html](http://gregorio.stanford.edu/holbrook/CableCosts.html)
says that cost of undersea cables in the '90s was in the $27k-$56k/km range,
with the $27k a bit of an outlier.

Cost estimates for terrestrial cable are harder to come by, and seem depend a
lot on things like rights of way (likely not relevant here as a cost), terrain
(_very_ relevant), ability to get equipment to the right location, etc. But
the numbers I'm seeing on various links from
[https://www.google.com/search?q=cost+of+laying+fiber+optic+c...](https://www.google.com/search?q=cost+of+laying+fiber+optic+cable+per+mile)
are in the $20k to $40k range per kilometer (I took the actual numbers I saw
and divided by 1.6) about 5-10 years ago. Figure about 1.4x smaller if you
want to adjust for inflation to compare to '90s numbers.

All of which is to say that "zillion" in this case is probably a number
somewhere between 1 and 4. Give or take; these are all estimates, obviously.
Also not clear to me which is faster to lay, by the way, which might matter in
terms of deciding which one to do.

Not to mention that the undersea cable might be shorter, offsetting some of
the per-km difference in cost, since it's a lot easier to go straight.

------
incanus77
What sort of tech is it built on? Looks like Mapbox.js plus probably designed
in TileMill, then self-hosted? What else went into making it?

------
yuribit
Some days ago we were discussing about sharks eating these calbes and how
Google stops them [http://www.forbes.com/sites/amitchowdhry/2014/08/15/how-
goog...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/amitchowdhry/2014/08/15/how-google-stops-
sharks-from-eating-undersea-cables/)

~~~
jimktrains2
> James M. Barrett, a former deputy director of international engineering for
> AT&T , said that there were 55,000 or 60,000 miles of old undersea cable
> made out of copper that did not have a single case of shark biting, meaning
> sharks prefer to snack on fiber optic cables specifically. It is believed
> that the electrical current in the fiber-optic lines attract the sharks,
> triggering a feeding reflex.

"electrical current in the fiber-optic" but not copper?

~~~
tsomctl
Fiber optic wire has a very high voltage wire to power the amplifiers.
(Interestingly, it's only one. The ocean water provides the return path.)

~~~
jimktrains2
I guess I figured copper wire would also required amplification.

Interesting on the return path. Where does the source connect i.e. one side of
the "battery" goes to the amplifier (which returns to the sea, not the
battery) and the other side of the battery goes to where? the sea?

------
ursusk
I imagine you can use wget or curl to download the images (or other batch
download tools that let you put in ranges), then ImageMagick to stitch them
together. Not too hard, but all command line tools that may take a bit of
experimenting to get right.

~~~
therealmocker
This works for me

    
    
      curl http://a.tiles.telegeography.com/maps/submarine-cable-map-2014/6/\[0-9\]/9.png -o row09_column0#1.png
      curl http://a.tiles.telegeography.com/maps/submarine-cable-map-2014/6/\[10-63\]/9.png -o row09_column#1.png
    
      curl http://a.tiles.telegeography.com/maps/submarine-cable-map-2014/6/\[0-9\]/\[10-54\].png -o row#2_column0#1.png
      curl http://a.tiles.telegeography.com/maps/submarine-cable-map-2014/6/\[10-63\]/\[10-54\].png -o row#2_column#1.png
    
      echo "Creating montage"
      montage -mode concatenate -tile 64x *.png final_map.png

------
frandroid
$250 for the paper copy? Really?

~~~
maxmcd
It's a b<>b play. They're not looking to sell to consumers, they sell to
companies that need this map for reference.

~~~
phil21
Eh.. This map is not useful whatsoever for reference, other than in a general
"sales guy" sort of sense.

Speaking for my company, I buy these each year because A) It looks great
framed in our lobby and B) I want to support continued development of such
things.

When you compare them to actual fiber maps, they are accurate mostly in the
general sense and not all that useful for planning specific routes anywhere.

------
kissickas
Does anyone know of a map where I can select two locations and find the
shortest path (via submarine cable, obviously) between them?

By the way, this is a nice one. Happy to see that I can scroll indefinitely in
one direction.

~~~
ape4
traceroute :)

~~~
kissickas
While that's not exclusively following submarine cables, it is of course the
more practical and useful solution to the problem. Thanks.

------
dalek2point3
anyone have any idea what happens to user experience when one of these guys
breaks? is it a big deal? what about islands who are surviving off of one
cable connection?

~~~
runeks
You will notice that almost all the cables are laid out in a ring shape. For
example, check out the TAT-14 cable:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TAT-14#mediaviewer/File:Map_TA...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TAT-14#mediaviewer/File:Map_TAT-14.png)

If only a single cable break occurs, every point is still reachable from every
other point -- the worst thing that happens is that ping times might increase
because the packets will have to travel a longer route.

This layout is called a self-healing ring:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-
healing_ring](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-healing_ring)

~~~
dfox
As typical L2 technology for such cables is SDH/SONET, the difference in
latency after single ring failure tends to not be noticeable for normal IP
traffic.

~~~
runeks
Interesting. Can you expand on this? How is that possible?

If we take the TAT-14 example again:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TAT-14#mediaviewer/File:Map_TA...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TAT-14#mediaviewer/File:Map_TAT-14.png)

How will the ping times not increase dramatically from Bude (UK) to Saint-
Valery-en-Caux (FR) if the connection between them breaks?

~~~
mikeyouse
The total length of the cable is 'only' 15,428km. So the maximum one-way
latency between any two points is only ~70ms assuming 0.7C. You'd definitely
notice if you were gaming, but probably not if you were watching YouTube.

------
rootuid
Ireland has multiple undersea cables landing there but none are on this map.
Makes one wonder about the readability of this particular map.

~~~
vool
Was thinking the same, considering that the first few transatlantic landed in
Ireland. Recently visited a section of the first transatlantic cable in
Valencia Island no idea how they got much of it on a ship.

------
nilsimsa
How do they handle it when cables cross over each other and they need to do
repair on the one on the bottom?

~~~
gkanai
The cable repair ships send down custom ROVs that can bring up the broken
cable ends. The cable cut is repaired on ship and then placed back on the sea
bed. Amazing.

------
dmix
I'm curious how many of them are tapped? Or would need to be tapped to get
total coverage?

------
andyford
Totally awesome. But can't buy the wall map until they fix the "asterix" typo!

------
ksec
Does anyone knows the total capacity of all these submarine cables?

~~~
iSloth
At the end of the day these submarine cables are just optical cables, that is
a really long strand of glass that you can send optical light (laser) down,
and it'll pop out at the other end.

So the capacity is really based on the equipment at either end (and repeaters
if required), the cables can degrade overtime due to hydrogen impregnation and
damage from ships etc... your also limited by distance before you need to
repeat, however basically there will be newer and faster hardware on the
market every day meaning there is no way to work out the total capacity.

I've seen unrepeated short span submarine cables only lit/working at 10Gbps,
the equipment at either end can support substantially faster (100Gbps+) with
some small hardware changes, however simple business sense means your only
going to provide capacity for what your customers are only demanding.

Prices are also more relational to the traffic going over them cables (and
demand) rather than the distance, for example it can be cheaper to get from
London to New York on one of these cables than it is to get around the UK.

------
ChrisArchitect
hey what is the difference between this and
[http://submarinecablemap.com/](http://submarinecablemap.com/) just
interactivity?

------
spacefight
Related:
[https://twitter.com/trevorpaglen/status/504713665908850689](https://twitter.com/trevorpaglen/status/504713665908850689)

------
mentat
The lack of interconnect between Africa and South America is interesting.
Wouldn't that be a better route with other transatlantic failures than moving
to Pacific transit?

Surveillance issue?

~~~
iSloth
A failure of a transatlantic cable is just going to cause providers (in most
cases) to switch their traffic to another transatlantic cable.

------
junto
Poor New Zealand!

~~~
alicebob
More like poor Cuba!

~~~
nly
Linked by ALBA-1[0], which apparently is carrying public traffic since early
last year[1], although everything in Cuba is highly restricted and filtered by
the state. Worth reading the Wiki article[2]

[0] [http://submarinecablemap.com/#/submarine-
cable/alba-1](http://submarinecablemap.com/#/submarine-cable/alba-1)

[1] [http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/01/22/us-cuba-
internet-i...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/01/22/us-cuba-internet-
idUSBRE90L13020130122?irpc=932)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Cuba](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Cuba)

------
ck2
Hard to imagine NSA intercepts most of that.

~~~
pyvpx
all five cables landing at that tiny country in the Horn of Africa, Djibouti?
they terminate into half a floor of a single building about 150ft from the
shoreline. the NSA has been tapping submarine optical cables since the early
nineties.

for the patch panels they can't get to, there's always the covert submarine
they are purported to have.

~~~
rweir
pretty well documented, too:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Halibut_(SSGN-587)#Special_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Halibut_\(SSGN-587\)#Special_operations_missions.2C_1965_-_1976)

------
snake_plissken
Why does Saudi Arabia have so many?

~~~
ape4
Probably because of their key location.

~~~
alexqgb
That part of world has been capitalizing on its position with regard to trade
routes since the Sumerians pioneered exchange with the Indus Valley
civilization. It's remarkable to see this development as the latest iteration
of a truly ancient tradition.

------
aluhut
I wonder how the location looks like where they land. Especially when there
are so many landing in one place. Must be a really good secured place.

------
filipoll
Isn't this incredibly dangerous to have publically available? Please take this
down.

~~~
ape4
lol, should hacker news remove the link to that page? Yeah, that'll fix it.

~~~
happyscrappy
It works for Europe's right to be forgotten, for silly definitions of "works".

