Interactive Submarine Cable Map

Infrapedia looks incredible and far more detailed. When zoomed in, Infrapedia accurately displays the ends of cables down to the street and building.

Interesting. I was looking at the seemingly odd choice of a loop out of Texas to Mississippi through the Gulf. Then I realized the roughnecks on the drilling platforms need their netlfix bing fixes too!

> Turns out something like that exists

Except that map is rubbish. Sorry, but it is.

Look at the UK for example, apparently "iomart DC4 Leicester" is just off Berkeley Square, London.

Not only is that technically incorrect (Leicester != London), but its hilarious to propose that anyone would build a datacentre in that part of London (its hedge-fund central where rents are three-digits per square foot .... plus there isn't the space anyway to build a datacentre of any sort of meaningful scale).

And the map is just full of such examples.

So yeah, I've grave concerns for the accuracy of that resource.

This is literally the article that resulted in my mid-1990s teenage self being motivated to work in ISP core network engineering, which is what I've been doing now for twenty years...

I wish Stephenson would write more things like this in addition to his novels.

It's cool seeing the map of the cable he writes about, FLAG: https://www.submarinecablemap.com/submarine-cable/flag-europ...

Such an amazing piece of writing. I think it's also the longest piece Wired ever published.

First thing I looked for as well.

The bandwidth depends on the equipment connected to it on each end, which I don't think is public information.

It's a classic but I do enjoy having a look at it every few years.

* Cheaper to put telecoms&DC facilities out of expensive areas

* Little benefit from landing in the urban area

* Cities often have extra regulatory requirements

* Higher risk of cable breaks if you are in an area with lots of development or in a river with dredging

The CLION terminates in Rostock which is quite hit and near a river, called Warnow.

https://www.submarinecablemap.com/submarine-cable/c-lion1

In the US there are quite a few landings just outside of NYC and LA. I'd guess London is too far inland, and it's cheaper to run fiber over land.

There is probably also an incentive to keep the cables away from major shipping lanes where they'd disrupt the ability for ships dropping anchor. Notice around Seattle some cables snake up and through the sound, but it's also extremely deep water. That landing is also far north of the city proper, so any ships waiting near port are a ways from the landing site.

As others have mentioned, the more you get close to a population center the more activity is happening, even underwater in rivers.

Anchors are being drug, there are other already existing lines, it's all quite complicated.

If you have a fatpipe already running OUT of the city center, it can be much easier to join up to that elsewhere, and then dip into the drink.

Also tons of cheap hydro-power. There used to be lots of Aluminum smelting up there, but that mostly moved out of country in the late 70's/early 80's.

The cable landing I’ve seen outside Skagway, AK is just a shed on the rocks. And about a hundred warning signs of the federal crimes you’re committing if you get close.

A lot of the time these landing sites / buildings are a bit further inland. At the beach there is usually only a buried armoured cable leading to a concrete slab or something where it connects to underground ductwork.

If you're interested in that and have an hour of time there is a youtube video[1] of a local tracking these down around the Cornwall area.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_nnUbX7uuQ

That's Sir Arthur C. Clarke to you!

From the Oregon coast landing stations, one of the predecessor entities acquired by level3 (now lumen) built a ring of fiber to Hillsboro, another was built by wave (now known as rcn/grande/astound) much later with as much diversity as they could from the existing route.

Taiwan biggest trading partner is, by far, mainland China. And Hong-Kong is not far down the list [1]. Media might give you the impression that China and Taiwan are practically at war, and that might even be true in so far as China is contemplating invading Taiwan.

But if you look at the history between the Taiwan and China [2], there has been a lot of economical cooperation, after the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989 (many foreign companies left China at the time, leaving a void filled by Taiwan), and especially between 2008 and 2016. So it's not surprising at all that there are cables in the strait.

[1] https://www.worldstopexports.com/taiwans-top-import-partners...

[2] https://econreview.berkeley.edu/dancing-with-the-dragon-an-e...

Yep. Used to have it on my wall. This year's edition: https://submarine-cable-map-2022.telegeography.com/ ("Buy the Wall Map" at the far bottom right of the page).

I love how the cable-layers carefully made all those US-EU cables perfectly parallel.

The length of it is exaggerated on the map due to map projection (obligatory comment). In reality it's about as long as the one connecting Oregon to Taiwan (which is long, but not record-setting.)

Probably a pretty important project to do that one for Russia anyway, it connects all parts of the country.

That made me think that laying underwater cable must be very economical. There's lots of loops that look completely unnecessary, like the Gulf of Mexico. But maybe it was cheaper than installing cables on land? And the terrain of Northern Russia is probably a lot harder to deal with than Texas.