2012 Submarine Cable Map | Hacker News Reader

2012 Submarine Cable Map

submarine-cable-map-2012.telegeography.com

176 pointsimaginator68 comments

Everything about undersea cabling is fascinating. Here's a video of powering up an undersea cables's repeaters: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2zDrUz9lgY (it takes about 30 mins to fully ramp up an undersea cable).

And of course the obligatory video showing how they load a submarine cable onto a ship http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1JEuzBkOD8

"the obligatory video showing how they load a submarine cable onto a ship"

They have $57 million worth of fairleads going into the ship and they're still using the thing with the two old car tires like an old baseball pitching machine?

It's ruggedized cable, designed to live underwater for decades(or centuries at this point). Besides, there's hundreds of miles of it, what else are you going to do?

Use something a little more...dignified...than two used car tires?

Because dignity: our packets need it.

Yes, yes. Most important.

From here on out, no more undersea cables. I won't have my data associating with riffraff of this sort. With such undignified origins, who knows what these cables might be capable of?

Now underground cables are a completely different breed entirely. Its installation is an altogether more dignified affair.

The soil is carefully tilled by refined gentlemen wielding silver spades and wearing freshly-pressed tuxedos. They carefully lay the cable down into its final resting place, whilst a full orchestra plays a requiem ever so softly in the background.

I'll bet those tires were purchased brand new...

To you it looks like two old car tires. To me it looks like the perfect tool for the job.

I suppose I had assumed all these cables were strictly fiber optic. Indeed fascinating. I should study up to remove my default assumptions.

They are fiber optic, however the repeaters require power to operate.

You can do repeater less fiber for longer and longer distances no, though -- probably around 1000km.

The really cool thing about the repeaters is that they're optical. They don't work by converting the incoming signal into an electrical impulse at all; instead, they amplify entirely in the optical domain.

Can you provide any more info as to how that works?

Here you go! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_amplifier#Doped_fiber_a...

Ergo, the cables are not strictly only fiber optic. There are metal power lines as well.

A while back Sean Gorman did some really interesting work mapping critical infrastructure. If you are interested in this sort of stuff I highly recommend checking out his work:

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=sean+gorman+critical+inf...

Is this the one that was banned/frowned upon by the government because of so called "terrorists" might use this to attack our freedoms?

Obligatory link to Neal Stephenson's Wired article from 1996, 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": http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html

Every time this topic comes up. I am just completely awed by the idea that this is how most of our communication work. It seems so fragile and vulnerable to sabotage.

My country, Uruguay (look at South America below Brazil) took a very shortsighted approach to fiber links, and as a result we depend on a single cable running from Argentina.

It was cut down by a work crew once, thus leaving the entire country without Internet (well, with a so-slow-it-was-unusable Internet).

I'm sure there are several ways to re-route communications, so if one/several links go down, we just use a different route, with added latency of course.

This happened to Armenia, only it wasn't a work crew that cut the cable. It was some random old Georgian woman digging around:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/06/georgian-woman-c...

Was I the only one shocked by the $250 price tag? Shame -- at $25 I would have bought it straightaway.

Ha, I didn't even know it was something I could buy until I saw your comment. And yes, that does seem to be an exceptionally steep price for an undersea cable map...

You can often get the previous year for free. They are also commonly given as gifts by sales reps for carriers or data centers.

Why are there so many submarine cables going between Alaska and the continental US? Does the US not trust Canada to have land based cables, or is it actually better to go under the sea for that link?

Complete guess, but it might be harder to maintain overland cables running through the Rockies than undersea cables.

I think that's a good guess. Alaska contains some pretty gnarly terrain, including (but not limited to) a fair number of glaciers.

As does much of B.C., which you'd have to cross on the land route to Alaska.

Sea is cheaper. Land links require roads for the trucks to drive on and much more labour than sea links.

If this was true, wouldn't we see more links between cities on the NE coast and in the gulf of mexico? I was always under the impression we ran fiber along railroad routes.

I don't know US geography that well but it isn't a universal rule. Africa (cheap labour + under developed), for example, has many coastal cities linked by sea not land.

That is primarily because the cables get stolen or cut in those parts of the world. It's VERY hard to steal an undersea cable...

Land is cheaper when you are running though developed areas. But these areas of Alaska and Canada are desolate, you would first have to develop them and that is way more expensive then running undersea cable.

Also, I speculate that undersea cable is more resilient to seasonal freezing and thawing.

The eastern seaboard of the U.S. is much more hospitable and stable terrain. Alaska includes some pretty gnarly mountain ranges and a fair number of glaciers.

We do, kind of.

Note the links between Florida and the Yucatan peninsula. There are also some "hops" along the west cost of the US and many in South America.

Undersea cables make a lot of sense when you need to cover a lot of ground without a lot of interconnects in-between. For example, in the NE United States, the nodes are too close together for an undersea cable to make sense. There are many points of connection very close together, with well established infrastructure that can house the cabling on land. On the West Coast, you have long distances in-between without much infrastructure. For example, between LA and San Fran, you've also got Big Sur. There's nothing requiring a fat pipe in that distance, so running a cable out to sea means not negotiating perpetual land-use rights all the way up the coast.

There might be regulatory concerns involved in routing the cables, or maybe the investors simply had a more straightforward path in raising money for the project by pitching it as a domestic project. As you can see if you zoom in on the map, those connections are labeled (top to bottom, or if you will, north to south in map presentation)

Alaska United East

NorthStar

Alaska United West

and

ACS Alaska-Oregon

and at least three of those lines have connections to Canada via British Columbia (as can be seen in the zoomed-in view). And of course a map labeled "Submarine Cable Map" will by definition not show the many land connections that surely exist between the United States and Canada.

So it seems to me that nothing about the cable architecture here indicates mistrust of Canada on the part of the United States (or the other way around), but just a presentation decision on the part of the map-maker.

(I'm writing this from one of the states of the United States that borders Canada. I've done limited travel in Canada. Sure enough, the one time I stayed several days in Alaska with my wife we overflew Canada, doing a direct nonstop flight from Minneapolis to Anchorage. I've been in the air over Canada en route between the United States and east Asia almost as much as I've been on the ground in our friendly neighbor to the north.)

After edit: And of course, as two other replies noted, cost and engineering ease of laying cables on the seabed rather than across a mountain range may make a great deal of difference. Thanks for adding that issue to the discussion while I was typing.

Alaska is also the location of a whole lot of cold war military installations. It was an anchor of Strategic Air Command during its heydey. It wouldn't surprise me if some of this redundancy was for weapons control systems.

Ok, I'll be the one to say it: Canadians and cables don't mix. They chew on the insulation and short the thing out. Pretty soon you're looking at a broken cable and a fried Canuck.

Mmm mmm mmmmm fried Canuck! Granny, heat up the stove!

Easy, so we can spy on Russian traffic.

NB: I one thing I notice is how few undersea links Russia has. There's a run to Japan, one to Finland, and a few through the Caucuses. Otherwise, Russian overseas network traffic is almost wholly dependent on third-party links.

Also impressed by India's connections. And of course, the NYC-London linkages.

Russia has lots of countries bordering it, so I'm guessing plenty go through other countries and then run along the rail networks.

I was in a city which was a couple of hundred k's from the next town or rail connection and they had pretty good broadband from what I could tell.

Feel sorry for us Kiwi's, only one cable (the southern cross) active at the moment.

The land route to Canada is this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Highway

It is not an easy, nor accessible route, and it gets you to Fairbanks, in any event - from there you'd have to double back down to Anchorage.

I could easily see undersea cables with a bit of ice at the end being easier to deal with than cables laid in permafrost in an extremely harsh landscape, with large temperature fluctuations throughout the year.

It's really fascinating to see the cables go around Cuba (except for a single cable), compared to much of the rest of the world where there is a great deal of redundancy (except where it would be too much work, like a couple of the more remote islands).

Not so strange considering USA's continued bullying of Cuba despite there being no reasons to do so for a long time.

I would imagine has more to do with the absolute shambles that is the Cuba economy. When you can't feed your populous, underseas communication cables seem like a bit of a luxury.

The last time there was endemic food distribution problems in Cuba (the "periodo especial") sort of completely ended before the beginning of the 21st century. It was mostly because Cuba was unable to meet its own demand for oil during the collapse of the Soviet Union.

You can bash the Cuban economy all you want, but feeding of its population is not a good place to start. It ranks among the top american countries (that includes the US and Canada) in the UNs undernourishment rating since 2002. As of 2006 it has also ranked consistently in the top3/top5 of american countries in children undernourishment indexes, sometimes above or matching the USA and Canada.

Wikipedia gives some insight:

Most access is to a national intranet which consists of an in-country e-mail system, a Cuban encyclopedia, and websites that are supportive of the government.[7] Such a network, similar to the Kwangmyong used by North Korea, prevents unwanted information from outside of the country getting into the closed system. One network link connects to the global internet and is used by government officials and tourists, while another connection for use by the general public has restricted content. Myanmar uses and Iran has plans to implement a similar system.[11]

[...]

A new undersea fiber-optic link to Venezuela (ALBA-1) was scheduled for 2011.[12][13] [...] In May 2012 there were reports that the cable was operational, but with use restricted to Cuban and Venezuelan government entities. Internet access by the general public still uses the slower and more expensive satellite links.[17]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Cuba

That cable was sold to Cuba by Venezuela. Cuba paid market price for the whole contract. Venezuela triangulated the sale using I believe a French contractor, in order to avoid the economic blockade imposed by the US. Even with Venezuela and France in the middle of the transaction it is still debatable whether someone violated the blockade...

Getting and undersea cable through to you when there is a law in the US that prevents virtually any commercial transaction with your country turns out to be extremely difficult.

I believe the cable is not yet operational because of last-moment technical issues. It was also the first undersea cable to reach Jamaica, though they got another connection from Puerto Rico not a short time ago.

Wow, Svalbard, with a population of 2932 has not just one but two cables!

Similarly, I was surprised that Grover Beach in San Luis Obispo Country was chosen as the west coast's terminal station. Seems a bit random, no? Link: http://submarinenetworks.com/stations/north-america/usa-west...

I'm only a somewhat familiar with the geography there, but IIRC, it's similar to what's described here:

"Cables almost never land in industrial zones, first because such areas are heavily traveled and frequently dredged, second because of pure geography. Industry likes rivers, which bring currents, which are bad for cables. Cities like flat land. But flat land above the tide line implies a correspondingly gentle slope below the water, meaning that the cable will pass for a greater distance through the treacherous shallows. Three to thirty meters is the range of depth where most of the ocean dynamics are and where cable must be armored. But in wild places like Porthcurno or Lan Tao Island, rivers are few and small, and the land bursts almost vertically from the sea. The same geography, of course, favors pirates and smugglers."

"Wired 4.12: Mother Earth, Motherboard by Neal Stephenson":http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html (this article is old, but great if you're interested in sub cables)

See [0] and [1] for a bit more context. It seems the very high latitude is good for a satellite base station.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Satellite_Station [1] http://www.ksat.no/node/77

Interesting to have cables going there, but no cables (yet) going to research stations in Antartica.

Hey guys, congratulations on the release and the cool interface! I worked as an intern at TG back in 2005 and fondly remember playing around with this data to see where the connections were.

When I think of a submarine cable, I think about fiber optics and all the data that can go through it. But when I see a map of all the submarine cables on Earth, it reminds me of a nervous system. Unicellular organisms long ago started cooperating with one another and evolved into multicellular lifeforms. I get the impression that, as data transmissions increase year after year, humans are forming some sort of superorganism.

Nice. The cable that goes out from Argentina is 10 minutes from my home (In foot), in fact: My father helped the engineers who installed it.

Where's that? It looks like they're coming out from Santa Teresita. I used to go there on vacations with my friends a few years ago (I went there 5 years in a row!)... but I never heard of the cables.

Yep, Santa Teresita, I live there!

Such a small world.

It's very interesting to see the void through the Northwest passage (North of Canada).

It won't be like that for long: http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2012-03/thawing-nor...

I'm very please to see them listing Atlantic Emerald Express on here in addition to gregs cable map(http://www.cablemap.info/). There's been some talk of it not getting enough funding and we need more redundant links here in Iceland.

It is very interesting to see how much cabling lies off the horn of Africa and around the Arabian peninsula. If ever this was a stable region it might have severed well to these nations.

For some reason this makes me think of the matrix. Not the design of the site, just the "series of tubes" that are now surrounding the planet.

Is there a reason most of the cables run in the Southern hemisphere? Nothing runs across the top of Europe/Russia/Asia.

"Sponsored by Telecom Egypt". Now that's what i call ironic!

Where is the fiber in the SF Bay Area?

Probably at: http://www.submarinenetworks.com/stations/north-america/usa-...

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