Submarine Cable Map 2023

114 points by Galacta7 1 year ago | 60 comments
  • Scoundreller 1 year ago
    The Katittuq Nunavut Fibre Link, labelled as 2025, had its tender cancelled this year.

    https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/nunavut-cancels-tender-...

    > Nunavut is the only province or territory in the country [Canada] without access to fibre internet. The project would bring fibre to both Iqaluit and nearby Kimmirut.

    Right now, everything is over satellite. Too bad the big "internet cache" systems don't have sneakernet approaches to filling their caches. Unsure if their local ISP does any kind of caching. So every stream/download/update, etc. is its own "hit" over the downlink.

    Thanks to Canada's terrible mobile telecom pricing and lacklustre competition, a cell phone with a dataplan in this territory is cost-competitive with the rest of the country...

    https://www.qiniq.com/mobile/#plans

    • betaby 1 year ago
      The whole territory of Nunavut is under 40k habitants. It's totally fine to serve it with satellite. Also I don't see how any completion is possible, again, for a territory with under 40k habitants.
    • nemoniac 1 year ago
      Some years ago I visited the Transatlantic Cable Station on Valencia Island off the west coast of Ireland, from where the first submarine telegraph cable was laid to Newfoundland in 1857. After several attempts the cable reached Newfoundland in 1866.

      Before that moment the fastest way to get a message from Europe to America was aboard a ship; two weeks or so. After that it could be sent over a cable with Morse code.

      https://valentiaisland.ie/valentia-transatlantic-cable-stati...

      • _whiteCaps_ 1 year ago
        If this sort of thing interests you, I highly recommend "Mother Earth Mother Board" by Neal Stephenson. Probably my favourite piece of writing in Wired.

        https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/

        • Kim_Bruning 1 year ago
          There's a rotating sphere at the top of the map, but part of it is black, and apparently you're not supposed to use it? It's just decoration?

          You scroll down to what you think is the map, but it immediately gets covered by a caption, so you scroll down more ...

          It turns out that downloads for the actual map are at the top of the page.

          • FL410 1 year ago
            ...but only after you scroll all the way to the bottom. What a horrible design.
            • Tempest1981 1 year ago
              Yeah, very frustrating to see just the Pacific Ocean w/o text blocking half of it.

              Fortunately mmwelt posted another link for exploring:

              https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38503448

              • joering2 1 year ago
                Came here to say the same. And clicking on the globe does not stop it. Then trying to zoom and you can't but the globe image is too blurry/low res to read what's on it. Don't get me even started on scrolling...
            • ezequiel-garzon 1 year ago
              I love these maps, and I'm glad they provide downloads like [1]. I wish the resolution was a bit higher. As it is the names of the towns on the coasts can be read with difficulty.

              [1] https://submarine-cable-map-2023.telegeography.com/images/Su...

              • dotancohen 1 year ago
                Wow, that map is very political. Israel is not mentioned by name, but the Palestinian Territories are.
                • josh_frome 1 year ago
                  Telecom Egypt is the sponsor of the map
                  • jacooper 1 year ago
                    So writing Israel isn't Political? Your definition of political is obviously biased.
                    • dotancohen 1 year ago
                      Would writing Germany be Political? Writing Ukraine? These nations exist and are functioning parts of international relations.
                    • Kye 1 year ago
                      There is no selection of labels for disputed territory that will make everyone happy. It's inherently political.
                      • dotancohen 1 year ago
                        With the exception of the ambitions of fringe terrorist groups, the land that Israel has ruled since 1948 is not disputed territory.
                      • h0nd 1 year ago
                        Maybe to avoid politics, the name of the region was used.
                        • dotancohen 1 year ago
                          That would have been an acceptable explanation in the 1950s or early 60s. But after 1964 one of the sides adopted the regional name as a national identifier, thus invalidating it as a neutral name.
                      • mikae1 1 year ago
                        Too bad it's a rather shitty JPEG that's blotchy in the more uniform "white" areas. I've been able to compile a map from the png tiles for the earlier versions of this map.

                        It uses mapbox.js and tiles have URLs like this one: https://tiles.telegeography.com/maps/submarine-cable-map-202...

                        https://dezoomify-rs.ophir.dev/ is helpful.

                      • mmwelt 1 year ago
                        The interactive online version is available here:

                        https://www.submarinecablemap.com/

                        • h0nd 1 year ago
                          I was looking for this as I was surprised that a map would be displayed the way it is in the shared link.
                          • Tempest1981 1 year ago
                            Much better, thank you.
                          • jedberg 1 year ago
                            Given all the compute infrastructure in Ireland, I'm surprised it still has no direct connection to continental Europe (they all go through the UK first).
                            • Scoundreller 1 year ago
                              I wonder if they put in a "long-way-around" splice into these forks in the Atlantic, so Ireland would have a connection to Denmark:

                              https://www.submarinecablemap.com/submarine-cable/havfrueaec...

                              Then you've got this link to the SW tip of UK, that then links to France (via Guernsey & Jersey): https://www.submarinecablemap.com/submarine-cable/pan-europe...

                              There might be an overall direct fibre link.

                              But yeah, Ireland is at risk of the UK cutting most of their continental Europe capacity.

                              I've seen some strange investments though that don't seem to add much more on top of what's already there, like this company's: https://crosslakefibre.ca/network/ But maybe despite ample existing infrastructure, the incumbent providers suck so they can make a successful go at providing a bypass.

                              • SnorkelTan 1 year ago
                                The reduction in latency and additional throughput is probably not worth the cost. I’m sure the cable operators have considered this.
                              • zrail 1 year ago
                                How do these cables split in the middle of the ocean? Is there a fiber switch laying on the ocean floor?
                                • rdl 1 year ago
                                  There are repeaters on the cable every ~50-200km (depending on technology), powered by DC power carried on the cable. There are branching units powered the same way -- I believe they handle branching at the fiber level, rather than waves, but not sure of the specifics on modern DWDM cables. (they can run ~80-160 different frequencies of light on the same fiber, and the cables contain multiple fibers...)
                                  • aDfbrtVt 1 year ago
                                    Quick correction - not repeaters but amplifiers. The term repeater is commonly used to refer to a device that demodulates and remodulates a signal.
                                  • Maakuth 1 year ago
                                    No idea of what precise sort of hardware is there, but the fact is that these cables consist of a bunch of fibers. Dozens of them typically, quick search suggests up to 144, but I doubt that's a physical ceiling. So I suppose they make a branch when needed, with some number of fibers going to another direction.
                                  • ThinkBeat 1 year ago
                                    Is it safe to assume that there exists a lot of cables that we are not supposed to know about or at least that are not public and not on such amps?

                                    I have long been thinking that the NSA must have some high capacity "black" cables to help the surveillance of the internet. Primarily to capture data, sending all the captured data back through the public internet would be counterproductive.

                                    A 5eye private subsea network?

                                    I would assume other countries have some for similar reasons

                                    • dmvdoug 1 year ago
                                      Well, SOSUS had cables that people knew fed into landing stations on the coast but what exactly they were for remained classified until like the 1980s. So those are literally classified government cables. If you mean secret Internet cables, I have no clue, but hey, history teacher had a history answer so… hi. :)
                                    • sklargh 1 year ago
                                      Does anyone else find it a little weird that the Great Salt Lake is shown on the map but Lake Champlain and Lake of the Woods are not?
                                      • dotancohen 1 year ago
                                        I just noted in another comment how the map is very political in its choice of things to label.
                                      • ericra 1 year ago
                                        It's amazing how many cables there are routing through the Suez Canal, especially directly connecting Mumbai all the way through to Marseille.

                                        I wonder how well protected they are specifically in the Suez Canal. Presumably the whole area is pretty well surveilled by the Egyptian government, but I have no clue. I just think it's really interesting how many cables are (understandably) routed this way and wonder whether there is full backup redundancy in the few cables running around south of Africa.

                                        • 082349872349872 1 year ago
                                          I was initially surprised by how highly the cable map correlates with canonical surface traffic routes, but upon reflection I guess the basic economics of trade centres drives both, so I should've expected it...
                                        • badrabbit 1 year ago
                                          If fiber cables like these are possible, why not pneumatic tubes maybe 1 meter in diameter. Think of the economic and environmental implications!
                                        • gist 1 year ago
                                          Well a random check of one cable (Gemini Bermuda) shows it was decommissioned in 2004. I wonder how up to date the rest is (based on this one entirely random check).

                                          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(submarine_communicatio...

                                          • huytersd 1 year ago
                                            So is dijibouti some massive switching station hub or do those cables just go by it underwater?
                                            • toast0 1 year ago
                                              My understanding is most of the multipoint cables are not switched at every point, it's more of a bundle of cables where each point gets a strand or two to every other point (or selected points, maybe the anchor points connect to all others, but minor points might only connect to the anchors and not each other).

                                              That said, Djibouti is a major cargo transport hub for Ethiopia, and is probably a network transport hub as well. Ethiopia is the 2nd most populated country in Africa and that would justify a lot of cable landings.

                                            • davedx 1 year ago
                                              If the world could run power along all these submarine telecoms cables then we'd be a lot further towards solving the problem of renewable power generation. I wonder how these kinds of cables compare to HVDC cables in terms of size and cost.
                                              • ccakes 1 year ago
                                                They do, any cable over about 1000km has active repeaters on the seabed which need to be powered.

                                                There is HVDC equipment on both ends and typically each end is sufficient to power the entire cable independently to allow for the cable to continue running through maintenance, shunt faults (basically something earthing out on sea water) or a single failed repeater.

                                              • 1 year ago
                                                • tiahura 1 year ago
                                                  I'm not seeing my favorite, Honotua. It connects Hawai'i to Tahiti. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honotua
                                                  • cliffordc 1 year ago
                                                    Is there somewhere we can see submarine and land cables both?
                                                    • ivix 1 year ago
                                                      Land cables are usually considered classified/sensitive information, so no not generally.
                                                    • ris 1 year ago
                                                      Dear map widgets in 2023,

                                                      Stop asking me for WebGL, I will not give it to you.

                                                      • rmah 1 year ago
                                                        It's interesting how Europe-Asia interconnects are so small relative to US-Asia and US-Europe.
                                                        • jedberg 1 year ago
                                                          This is only undersea cables. Europe and Asia have overland connections too. But mostly it's because both continents do more business over the internet with the US than with each other.
                                                        • everybodyknows 1 year ago
                                                          Are any of the spatial datasets that may have gone into this available for public download?
                                                          • Thaxll 1 year ago
                                                            I mean the website is crap, how do I see the map as a whole?
                                                          • maxlin 1 year ago
                                                            This has to be the worst possible way to present this. Just give us a, you know, MAP. With openable annotations and panning so we aren't locked in some view we didn't navigate to with tons of info about something we didn't actually seek out.
                                                          • vikmals 1 year ago
                                                            Doesn't work
                                                            • xkekjrktllss 1 year ago
                                                              I have a 5k display and I can't even quite make the page wide enough to view the entire globe. How are people with regular displays supposed to view it? What a disaster of a presentation!
                                                            • aaron695 1 year ago
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