

Submarine Cable Map - leonvonblut
http://www.submarinecablemap.com/

======
jschulenklopper
Perfect occasion to point to the absolutely wonderful article "Mother Earth
Mother Board" in which 'the hacker tourist ventures forth across the wide and
wondrous meatspace of three continents, chronicling the laying of the longest
wire on Earth' \- Neal Stephenson.

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

(Quite a long read though: over 40k words.)

~~~
jschulenklopper
And this should be the cable project that Neal Stephenson described:
[http://www.submarinecablemap.com/#/submarine-cable/flag-
euro...](http://www.submarinecablemap.com/#/submarine-cable/flag-europe-asia-
fea)

------
urschrei
Related: Submarine Cable Taps [http://lifewinning.com/submarine-cable-
taps/](http://lifewinning.com/submarine-cable-taps/) (Source:
[https://github.com/lifewinning/submarine-cable-
taps](https://github.com/lifewinning/submarine-cable-taps))

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alex_hitchins
To anyone visiting the UK who finds this sort of thing interesting, I
recommend Porthcurno Telegraph Museum.
[http://www.porthcurno.org.uk](http://www.porthcurno.org.uk)

~~~
colinramsay
My partner used to work there and did research in their archives as part of
her PhD research. It's well worth a trip since you have the astonishing Minack
Theatre [1] and a very beautiful beach within walking distance [2].

It's not often you see Cornwall on HN :)

[1]
[https://www.visitcornwall.com/sites/default/files/styles/pro...](https://www.visitcornwall.com/sites/default/files/styles/product_image/public/Minack02.jpg?itok=klfRUvgB)

[2]
[https://www.visitcornwall.com/sites/default/files/styles/pro...](https://www.visitcornwall.com/sites/default/files/styles/product_image/public/PorthcurnoPW.jpg?itok=6ilofe1N)

------
mrfusion
Do the gray wires mean anything special? There are a lot going to the north
pole.

Also I see no one has bothered hooking up Antarctica. (I always thought that
would be a good place for a data center in light of free cooling.)

~~~
ptaipale
It's very impractical to put anything in Antarctica. The continent is very far
from any place where substantial numbers of people live. The northern
hemisphere has much more habitation in the arctic and sub-arctic areas.
Moreover, the northern hemisphere in general is wealthier and more populous
than southern, so it makes sense to put data centers to the North.

Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost part of South America, lies at 55°S.
There's nobody living further to the south than that. Very few people live
even at 50°S.

55°N lies Copenhagen, Newcastle upon Tyne, Moscow, Kazan and Chelyabinsk.
Cities like Glasgow, Oslo, Gothenburg, Stockholm, Kaliningrad, Helsinki,
Tallinn and St. Petersburg are further to the north. Population gets more
sparse north of 60°N (I think about 20-25 million people live north of that, a
quarter of them Finns) but even when you are looking for cool surroundings, it
makes sense to put data centers in places where you have people and
infrastructure like stable energy and connectivity.

~~~
ckozlowski
Ars Technica did a good article on this very thing. While the cooling is nice
in some aspects, down there it's a bit too much, as components become brittle
and easily damaged at temperatures that low. Static electricity is a larger
concern with air that dry. (moisture is frozen out, and Antarctica is
literally a desert.) Not the place to simply set your PC outside and go for
the overclocking record.

[http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/04/coolest-jobs-in-
tech...](http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/04/coolest-jobs-in-tech-
literally-running-a-south-pole-data-center/)

~~~
ptaipale
That as well. You don't think of it that way, but the place is arid.

------
gworf
Also interesting is the Level 3 Network Map:
[http://maps.level3.com/default/](http://maps.level3.com/default/)

------
jjp
In case anybody else wonders the routes are stylised and not the physical
route and landing points are not the exact location.

~~~
anonymfus
And there is also more stylised version, with medieval style:

[http://submarine-cable-map-2015.telegeography.com/](http://submarine-cable-
map-2015.telegeography.com/)

[https://www.telegeography.com/telecom-maps/submarine-
cable-m...](https://www.telegeography.com/telecom-maps/submarine-cable-
map/index.html)

~~~
jjp
Nice rendering and the additional information on latency from Great Britain as
the pseudo-scale and changes in lit fibre all nice additions.

------
avargas
I'm curious why none of the cables go through the Gulf of Mexico into Texas
(or somewhere around there)? There are many datacenters around Texas, I'd
think it would make sense to have some cables going there to speed things up,
or maybe I'm wrong?

~~~
abakker
seems like the design minimizes the runs that are underwater. The gulf is VERY
deep at the center, and the distance saved is probably negligible compared to
the easier to maintain overland routes. Just my guess though.

------
virtuallynathan
[http://subtelforum.com/articles/products/submarine-cable-
alm...](http://subtelforum.com/articles/products/submarine-cable-almanac/) is
another great resource for submarine cable aficionados.

------
agd
Great display of one of the reasons why GCHQ and the NSA can intercept so
much.

------
hackuser
What costs less, laying and operating cable underwater or over mountains? That
is, what are the relative costs of land and submarine cables for long
distances?

Looking at the runs that follow the coasts of South America, SE Asia, and
northern Canada, I wonder why some of them weren't run over land. (Obviously
very many cables do run over land; this map only shows submarine cables.)

In my imagination, it seems easier to drop a cable from big spool on a ship
than to run it over mountains, for example, but I really have no idea.

------
allending
Is there a way to sort this by capacity, completion date, and other metrics?
I'd love to see a timeline view of how submarine cable capacity has changed
over the last decade.

~~~
aet
Yes, that would be fascinating. Nice research project for you. Please report
back :)

Edit: You could probably find some info here

[https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-327090A2.p...](https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-327090A2.pdf)

------
mikey_p
There's also a project that attempts to map which AWS region is closest to a
country via undersea cable information: [https://github.com/turnkeylinux/aws-
datacenters](https://github.com/turnkeylinux/aws-datacenters)

------
pavel_lishin
I'd love it if someone made a Mini-Metro-like game, but instead of building a
subway in a city, you're trying to wire a planet.

[http://dinopoloclub.com/minimetro/](http://dinopoloclub.com/minimetro/)

------
chris_wot
Is this data open? If so, I wonder if it can be added to OpenStreetMap?

~~~
maxerickson
FCC regulates them in the US, "Submarine Cable License", they don't just pop
out of any document system though. The one I did find:

[http://licensing.fcc.gov/myibfs/download.do?attachment_key=9...](http://licensing.fcc.gov/myibfs/download.do?attachment_key=947070)

Uses Google data to show the locations, along with the lat/long (using the
textual lat longs should be fine from a copyright/data license perspective,
though I think lots of OSM people would hem and haw about it being in the same
document as Google data).

A lot of the filings are ownership updates to existing cables and don't
contain any information about the locations of the cables.

------
bobdvb
Old news, but it is also worth pointing to Greg's Cable Map:
[http://www.cablemap.info](http://www.cablemap.info)

------
dang
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8242448](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8242448)

------
brenfrow
I was actually just getting a kick learning where all the "major" cities were
up in North Canada.

