Submarine Cable Map 2021
submarine-cable-map-2021.telegeography.com
submarine-cable-map-2021.telegeography.com
Our house growing up was full of cable segments, superconductors, lasers, and microscopes. I remember one day he brought home a $100,000 microscope that had been thrown away, which I proceeded to use to look at banal things like leaves and insects, but was designed to look at the ends of cut fibers.
Anyway, its incredible to me how much these cables have transformed the world, and how invisible it is to all of us. Imagine if trans-continental communication relied on satellites? The global internet we have today would be much more isolated, with fiefdoms based on proximity.
For those interested in a fiber science story:
He once was asked to calculate the rate of seawater diffusion into glass, which he and the team found ridiculous, but I suppose it was unknown if water could soak into glass in an appreciable way over long periods of time. (Water is an important impurity to try and control)
How would you measure such a thing? There's no good way to increase the rate of diffusion of water into glass, but what you can do is make fiber with excess water in the core, and heat the fiber while measuring the diffusion of water out of the core into the outer portions of the fiber.
Then simple rate relations imply the rate of diffusion at sea floor conditions.
I believe the result was that you would see a 1% increase in the water concentration in the fiber over a period of 10,000 years. So his instinct, that it does not matter, was incredibly correct.
I hope nobody else has ever had to repeat such a measurement!
I honestly think they make for great decor when framed in the office.
https://shop.telegeography.com/products/2021-submarine-cable...
I always thought it would be a good action movie plot to follow what would happen if a malicious group intentionally disrupted these connections.
Not just on mobile.
Just on everything. It adds zero usability or information, it just hinders reading.
Normally I just try to ignore things like this but now this got me wondering: I assume at some point someone convinced someone else this was a must-have, a deal was made, things were implemented, money spent. Would such person/group honestly believe this is better (and in what way) than a static site? Or would this rather be a more calculated move like being able to charge/earn more because it takes longer to implement?
I've often found myself in the midsts of a caffeine binging thinking: I've definitely over complicated things for myself here.
In a similar way that the job isn't finished in the workshop until you've cleaned up, overly complicating software has a long tail too.
"Hey, how much does that satphone cost?"
"Who gives a shit?"
Article text: https://www.wired.com/1994/02/mao-bell/
Full magazine scan: https://archive.org/details/eu_Wired-1994-02_OCR
“Even people who carry cellphones carry pagers, which confused me until I found out that most of the cellphones I was seeing aren’t really cellphones at all; they are CT2 phones, which are cheaper and operate over a much shorter range. On a CT2, you can call out but you can’t receive calls, so you have to carry a pager. To cover a metropolis with CT2, tens of thousands of base stations would be needed. Coverage in Shenzhen is still spotty. When you see half a dozen young men loitering on the front steps of a building shouting into their prawns, you know there must be a CT2 station inside.”
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKeZaNwPKPo
Also "Demystifying Submarine Cables":
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pk1e2YLf5Uc
"Tutorial DWDM & Packet Optical Fundamentals Troubleshooting the Transmission Layer:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dum8UXtbN3o
APNIC has "DWDM & Packet Optical Fundamentals: How to troubleshoot the Transmission Layer":
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOgTU80YTDI
For long distance (>100km) transmission, searching for the keywords "coherent optics" is useful.
Links here for convenience:
Global: https://submarine-cable-map-2021.telegeography.com/images/Su...
America: https://submarine-cable-map-2021.telegeography.com/images/Su...
Asia Pasific: https://submarine-cable-map-2021.telegeography.com/images/Su...
Europe: https://submarine-cable-map-2021.telegeography.com/images/Su...
Middle East: https://submarine-cable-map-2021.telegeography.com/images/Su...
Apparently NASA funded the Svalbard cable [0] because it supports a satellite ground station.
The St. Helena government contracted a branch of a Google cable [1], in part, "to attract Digital Nomads to live and work on St Helena" (an HN thread discussed this aspect [2]).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Undersea_Cable_System
As for other submarine cables to medium size islands, it's a calculation based on a Telco, that until the advent of o3b, might have been paying $300,000 a month for geostationary transponder space. And the much fatter pipe that is fiber. In some cases partially government subsidized as an essential thing since remaining 100% dependent on satellite is a bad thing if you can afford to avoid it.
https://avinor.no/en/avinor-air-navigations-services/service...
- Underserved communities investments
- "Build it, and they will come" (as mentioned)
- Strategic purposes
- Incidental to running drops to other destinations
- Rich people wanted it ($50-800 megabucks)
I don’t care about super high quality paper but I do want lots of detail so it’s fun to lose yourself in.
Bonus points for individually illuminating lines based on your current internet traffic.
Any ideas how can I track the progress of each ASN in using it?
Cable capacity is generally leased as strands, then subleased as waves, then someone leases L2 circuits on top of that. Not like L3 where you can run a traceroute or whatever, though I wonder if you could determine possible cables based on latency…
Wow that would be awesome when it's fully operational. I sure hope we in the southeast asia region had that kind of latency to both europe and america (both are around 200ms from here).
https://www.nationalgrid.com/our-businesses/national-grid-ve...
A few years ago I saw a talk by an industrial chemist, long distance power transmission over carbon nanotube cables. Looks like they're still not ready for primetime.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_nanotubes_in_interconne...
[2] https://www.power-technology.com/features/featurethe-worlds-...
These cables have an optical amplifier every 50-100km which are supplied by DC power supplied through the protective metal armor around the fibres. Now if you think about it, what is ground if you have a cable between continents? There is no such thing as global ground, so there can be potential differences between of thousands of Volts.
Another one, how do you repair a broke cable that lays at a depth of 500m? TLDR, you bring both ends to the surface and splice a 1km of new cable between them. There are some videos from subcom (former TE subcom) on YouTube.
And regarding voltage between these two points, why would it be so high? And wouldn't it go down to 0 quickly after connecting the cable?
“Are the submarine cable paths shown the actual route taken by the cables?
No. The cable routes on our map are stylized and do not reflect the actual path taken by systems.
This design approach makes it easier to follow different cables and discern their landing points. In real life, cables that cross similar areas of an ocean take similar paths. These paths are chosen after comprehensive marine surveys that select routes to avoid hazardous conditions, which could potentially damage a cable.”
The extra loop heading north is probably the Greater Sunrise gas fields.
[1]https://www.vocus.com.au/why-vocus/our-network-and-expertise...
[2] https://im-mining.com/2019/08/06/pilbara-leads-way-haul-truc...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Hedland,_Western_Australi...
[4] https://www.woodside.com.au/what-we-do/international-develop...
And I'm also wondering how we experience bandwidth shortage, if there is, just congestion, slow links?
- Australia needs more global connectivity. IIRC, data transiting outside of AU is relatively expensive.
- China needs more connectivity, especially with the US for e-commerce (AliExpress is very slow).
- SE Asia mostly has a great deal of connectivity.
- India, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and France are well-connected.
- Iceland has 4, soon to be 5, links.
- St. Helena, Kiribati, Rurutu, Tubuai, and rural Canada along the Hudson are getting drops soon.
- There's no connectivity from the central southern US to Central/South America, it all goes through Florida.
AliExpress being slow is more likely a function of latency due to distance than connectivity or bandwidth. On bandwidth remember these lines represent cables, not the amount of bandwidth on the cable. 1 high capacity cable may be easily worth 100 of another on this map. On connectivity remember, much like South America being farther to the right, if you look on an actual globe instead of a flat projection the fastest path from China to the US is to go up to Japan not directly across the Pacific so adding connectivity there would not help.
As with most maps this map is missing many current and upcoming cables. E.g. I'm pretty sure Iceland has an additional submarine path or two not accounted for here. For land maps I've never seen anything remotely close to being complete (no fault of the map makers, most of the data just isn't accessible).
> China needs more connectivity, especially with the US for e-commerce (AliExpress is very slow).
To both of these points, yes and no.
- Population of Australia + NZ is about 30M people. While that's not nothing, 30M people don't require the same scale of deployment as serving India, or the US / Canada / Mexico.
- How much traffic to/from China is there in practice (given the Great Firewall, so it's largely unidirectional)?
Pinging aliexpress.com, I get ~100ms latency from US East Coast. From mtr, it turns out that I'm being served out of Germany ("alicloud-ic338528-ffm-b1.ip.twelve99-cust.net"; Telia uses ffm to denote Frankfurt). So latency to/from China is actually irrelevant here.
If you want to serve users faster, you need to invest in content delivery (whether that's buying from Akamai or other players in the space, or building out your own, as AliExpress has done -- I have a much lower ping to img.alicdn.com, which serves me out of New York).
CDN usage also lowers egress bandwidth costs, since you use transit links less (cachefill is expensive but infrequent compared to fetches from cache).
Either way -- higher latency dictates lower steady-state throughput; that said, most requests are short and dominated by start-up costs from e.g. TCP handshaking (especially in the world of larger initial congestion windows), so if you have +100ms latency, that's very visible in terms of flow completion time.
To some of your other points -- SE Asia has a lot of connectivity because it's one of two ways into India (the other way around the world goes through the Middle East, which is fraught with geopolitical tensions). Iceland is a convenient landing point en route to northern Europe. The other way to get from south-central US to South America is through LAX->SCL (Los Angeles -> Santiago, Chile).