
Map of worldwide undersea cables - mixmax
http://www.cablemap.info/
======
jf
If this interests you, Neal Stephenson's chronicle the FLAG cable getting laid
is required reading: <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html>

~~~
jacobolus
Is there any magazine today like the _Wired_ of the mid-1990s?

~~~
mkr-hn
Is Ars Technica close?

~~~
tptacek
No, not really. In fairness, a lot of old Wired articles were also really bad.

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jrockway
Whoa, nice error:

    
    
        Server Error in '/' Application.
        The process cannot access the file 'C:\Users\www.womble.co.za\cable_map\landing_stations.js' because it is being used by another process.
    
        Line 236:  public void PutFileContents(string filename, string txt)
        Line 237:  {
        Line 238:      TextWriter tw = new StreamWriter(filename);
        Line 239:      tw.Write(txt);
        Line 240:      tw.Close();
    

It seems that there is a race condition where each web request tries to open
this file, and Windows doesn't let you have the file open multiple times (at
least with the chosen options).

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jf
If people near San Luis Obispo are interested in seeing the maps of the cable
landings there, check out the library at Cuesta College, they have a huge
binder there mapping out the full route of cables from where they land in Los
Osos to San Luis Obispo.

I also spoke with an electrician who worked at the landing site in Los Osos,
he said that the building is very nondescript and that the stairwell has a
huge mural of what one might see if they were actually in the water, and not
in a stairwell.

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aerique
Quite a lot of those cables split in the middle of the ocean but zooming in I
don't see any islands. What would such an undersea junction look like? Or
would it be a platform?

~~~
pmjordan
I have a feeling they're actually separate cables that are laid at the same
time. Maybe they're even bound together in some way. It would be interesting
to know for sure.

EDIT: it turns out the cables do actually branch, using one of these:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_branching_unit>

~~~
woodall
Here are some images and information I found on these types of units.

[http://www.fujitsu.com/global/services/telecom/solution/subm...](http://www.fujitsu.com/global/services/telecom/solution/submarine/)

[http://global.mitsubishielectric.com/bu/communication/transm...](http://global.mitsubishielectric.com/bu/communication/transmission/submarine/products/wetplant.html)

<http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6809934.html>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_communications_cable>

<http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6534712.html>

[http://www.techcentral.co.za/aboard-the-ship-that-keeps-
sa-c...](http://www.techcentral.co.za/aboard-the-ship-that-keeps-sa-connected-
a-photo-essay/10553/)

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jodrellblank
Why is there a 5TBps line from the northern part of mainland Norway up to
Svalbard? Is there much telecomms there?

~~~
celoyd
From Svalbard you can see pretty much every polar orbit once per orbit, plus
Norway is politically stable and very liberal with research licenses there,
plus it’s warm for the latitude. So there’s demand from the kind of people who
have polar-orbiting satellites that produce a lot of data.

~~~
eirikref
Just to confirm your arguments, I'm quoting from from
<http://www.aftenposten.no/english/local/article545833.ece>: "Although
stretching cable for about 3,000 kilometers from Andoeya to Longyearbyen seems
inconvenient, the spot has been carefully chosen. Svalbard Satellite Station
(SvalSat) has specialized in retrieving data from satellites in polar
orbit..."

And then from <http://www.ksat.no/Products/Svalsat.htm>: "The satellite
coverage at this latitude holds unique opportunities and SvalSat is the only
commercial ground station in the world able to provide all-orbit-support (14
of 14 orbits) to owners and operators of polar orbiting satellites."

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thingie
You can't scroll across the Pacific, you can't even see the lines across the
Pacific as whole with both ends. But Bing maps can do that, what's wrong here?
It's quite a problem with this type of map.

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alonswartz
Not very surprising, but there is a perfect correlation between the major
"junctions" and Amazon's 4 data centers spanning the world, situated in North
California (us-west-1), North Virginia (us-east-1), Ireland (eu-west-1) and
Singapore (ap-southeast-1).

Recently I published an article describing how we find the closest data center
using GeoIP and indexing, might be of interest.
<http://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/geoip-amazon-regions>

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_delirium
Pretty interesting stuff. I was hoping to correlate some of my traceroutes
with these cables to figure out how my own international traffic is routed,
but it seems that with the rise of optical routing, not enough intermediate
hops show up for me to figure it out. For example, San Jose to Copenhagen
seems to be a single hop for me, so I have no idea what transatlantic cable my
data takes:

    
    
      xe-9-3-0.sjc10.ip4.tinet.net
      xe-1-2-0.cph10.ip4.tinet.net

~~~
mhansen
It could be Layer II routed - then the intermediate hops won't show up in
traceroute (a Layer III protocol)

~~~
_delirium
Ah yeah, that's probably more likely than layer 1 routing. There does seem to
be an increase in it, though; unless I'm mistaken, I seem to recall that 10
years ago it was a bit easier to get a rough idea of the geographical hops a
packet was taking. It seems quite a few large providers these days only do one
layer 3 hop, so all you see is the entry and exit at the borders of their
network.

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known
Map of worldwide cell towers
<http://client0.cellmaps.com/tabs.html#cellmaps_intl_tab> is also interesting

~~~
elblanco
You can definitely see why 3g service is so much better in Europe, Japan and
Korea than in the U.S.

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jberryman
Hoped if I zoomed in close enough I would be able to find the taps. But still
awesome.

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CoachRufus87
what's the diameter of one of these cables? are they literally laid on the
ocean floor?

~~~
jws
You can see one at <http://www.itnewsafrica.com/?p=3111>

And yes, they are laid on the floor, mostly. In shallows they may be armored
against sharks or plowed in to protect against anchors.

The Neal Stephenson, WIRED article is an excellent read, but honestly unless
you have a new Safari or some bookmarklet to extract the content from the
surrounding flashing lights and popping ads you will probably go blind before
you finish it.

~~~
russss
Printable version: <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html>

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vinhboy
I find it absolutely mind-blogging that this is truly how our
communication/internet infrastructure is implemented. Its almost unbelievable
to me.

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tobych
Plenty more of interest at
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telegraph_cable>, which covers the
first transatlantic telegraph cable. Anything to do with electrical
communications that smells of rubber and seawater makes me happy.

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saikat
Guam has more cables going into it than all of Australia or Africa.

~~~
goosmurf
Thanks to the presence of the US military.

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thaumaturgy
I get a really icky page error. The .NET server is even very helpfully showing
me the first four lines of the PutFileContents() function.

~~~
dennisgorelik
I have the same experience -- I'm getting very familiar ASP.NET crash page.
They didn't even bother to setup custom error page for production web site.
\--- The process cannot access the file
'C:\Users\www.womble.co.za\cable_map\landing_stations.js' because it is being
used by another process. \---

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mjcohen
How vulnerable are the cables to physical attack (i.e., drag something heavy
and sharp along the ocean floor)?

~~~
bradly
There are about 50 repairs in the Atlantic each year. The cables are damaged
by anchors and fishing lines and even things like shark bites and whale
entanglements.

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fairlyodd
Ok - I'm curious. How do you lay a cable across the Atlantic Ocean - a length
that spans thousands of miles?

~~~
mirkules
I thought about this too, so I let my imagination wander:

Solution 1: Perhaps there's a ship pulling a cable attached to a reel, and it
periodically drops the cable in the ocean with an anchor weight. The first few
times they did this, the engineers miscalculated the length of the cable. As
the ship sailed on, the reel got ripped from the ship's hull, the boat sank
and the captain didn't have a connection to send an SOS. Ironically, the
connection was at the bottom of the ocean, still attached to the reel.

Solution 2: Organize dolphins to pull cables across the Atlantic.
Unfortunately, the spinner dolphin species was chosen, resulting in many miles
of twisted fiber-optic cable. As you know, having kinks in fiber-optic cables
is a bad thing.

Solution 3: Use the Blues Brothers' car (with a cop engine, cop suspension and
cop brakes), roll up the windows and drive across the sea floor, laying the
cable down. I think this is how they actually did it

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barrydahlberg
While I'm glad they actually managed to include NZ, they could make it a
little more convenient to view...

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SkyMarshal
Is that map complete? Almost none of the cables seem to touch Russia.

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fouy
my name fouy and iy love pc

