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Comment by alister | Hacker News Reader

What's the location with the greatest connectivity? It's not New York City. Not Hong Kong (though it could be number 1 if you include some very near cities). And amazingly, San Francisco and the Bay Area have no cable landings at all near them.

It looks like it's Fortaleza (Brazil) with 17 cables making landfall there.

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Cables don't equal good connectivity.

Interconnection facilities are the best places to be (or rather what you want to be connected to in order to establish as many adjacencies). 111 8th in NYC. 165 Halsey in Newark. 350 easy cermak in chicago. Palo alto for the bay (but also eqx in San Jose). Infomart in dfw. Etc.

Cable landing stations generally service one cable and the actual networks that use it are generally some distance away.

I thought it was Frankfurt in Germany, but can't confirm, there is only public data on per country connectivity, where Germany is at the top. But Brazil is definitely in top 5, for top 5 connectivity from last year the countries were: Germany, Brazil, Ukraine, U.K., Switzerland. Submarine cables are only a small part of connectivity.

Correct, Frankfurt and Amsterdam are densest submarine fiber endpoints in Europe at least. FRA is EU's main financial and business hub, and even AMS, which has huge bandwidth, serves only as a transit location for FRA fiber. Frankfurt is about to become Europe's datacentre alley. Dublin is ahead now, but they will take over pretty soon

Frankfurt is also close to NATO's european command center

Biggest bandwidth is between North America, Virginia more precisely and Europe. There's datacentre alley in NOVA, probably tapped by three letter agencies (why would they, Loudoun and neighbouring counties, have most internet capacity in the world then?). About 70% of total internet ttaffic or more goes through NOVA

That 70% doesn’t pass the sniff test given half the world loves on the opposite side from there. No communications between Europe, Africa, Asia Or Austrailia would route via the east coast, neither would most traffic from North America to east Asia, not to mention all the intra-regional traffic.

https://blog.telegeography.com/does-70-of-the-worlds-interne...

Singapore is in the middle of it. It seems more fair to look at a general area instead of an exactly coinciding point on the map (it's not going to physically coincide on the same point anyway).

The general NJ-NYC area seems to be pretty dense with cable landings.

Lots of cables going through Singapore & Johor (Malaysia) - really hard to make out any details. I've dealt with abandoned cables in the area and the map doesn't look very accurate. Would have liked to be able to zoom in more.

Those cables are kinda of passing through there, not terminating, so it would make sense to divide their number by 2.

Anyone that's tried to understand the internet circumstance in New York City would know there are not dense cable landings there.

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