Eyeballing US Transatlantic Cable Landings

I love these maps for some reason. If you're interested in these, I've drawn a chart of cable crossings at http://commonwealth.io/chart/5628626. This is backed with data in a public Mongo instance, which you can query by pointing a Mongo driver to commonwealth.io port 27017.

"Tubes: a Journey to the Center of the Internet" by Andrew Blum[1] examines the transatlantic cables from a historical perspective, along with the rest of the internet. It's not especially technical and he talks about a dead squirrel maybe a few too many times, but it's a pretty good read. I wrote a review about it a month ago[2].

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/Tubes-A-Journey-Center-Internet/dp/006... [2]: http://www.petekeen.com/book-review-tubes-a-journey-to-the-c...

My favorite story about cables is Neal Stephenson's piece in Wired: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html

(I was actually looking at doing a 300 nautical mile repeaterless fiber system in the ~1999-2001 period. It looks like if you lay during an economic downturn when there's plenty of spare capacity in cableships and surplus cable, it's not actually that expensive. The problem is short cables tend to be in shallow water where there are lots of "issues", so you need armored or buried cable, which is much more expensive.

Great blast from the past:

Several of the transatlantic telecommunication companies -- Global Crossing, Tyco, Worldcom -- are in financial difficulty due to alleged deceptive accounting practices

Hey, I remember them!

So this is where the internet comes in to the East Coast? Was it completely unaffected by hurricane Sandy?