Undersea Cable Map Shows Where The Data Pipes Are 97
"Greg Mahlknecht has built a free map showing the world's submarine telecommunications cable systems. The map, which took Mahlknecht several months to complete, is free of charge and will remain so.'" (At least until it gets shut down as a security threat.)
Looks like the old telegraph maps (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Svlabard has a 5 TB cable? (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Undersea_Cable_System [wikipedia.org]
Its capacity is used by NASA, the United States Department of Defense, the European Space Agency, UNIS and others.
Antarctia? (Score:5, Informative)
Is there no cable to Antarctica? Hmm... (type, type, click, click) ... Oh, I see:
Antarctica is the only continent yet to be reached by a submarine telecommunications cable. All phone, video, and e-mail traffic must be relayed to the rest of the world via satellite, which is still quite unreliable. Bases on the continent itself are able to communicate with one another via radio, but this is only a local network. To be a viable alternative, the fiber-optic cable must be able to withstand temperatures of -80 C as well as massive strain from ice flowing up to 10 meters per year. Thus, plugging into the larger Internet backbone with the high bandwidth afforded by fiber-optic cable is still an as yet infeasible economic and technical challenge in the Antarctic.
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_communications_cable [wikipedia.org]
Re:Svlabard has a 5 TB cable? (Score:4, Informative)
Svalbard is an island in the Arctic Circle, with no permanent population.
There are over 2000 permanent residents [wikipedia.org] that disagree :)
Anyone that can tap a line could build this map (Score:5, Informative)
Who is this Greg Mahlknecht? He's just a random guy doing this as a hobby, which means he has no particular propreitar/secret inside information from AT&T or some other. It would be trivially easy to anyone that has the resources to tap a underwater comms line to just build this map from the same source data, summarized as follows in TFA:
Mahlknecht has drawn his data from a variety of sources. “Wikipedia has a ‘submarine communications cables’ category and I used this as a starting point before going to each cable’s homepage and gathering alternative information."
Another note is that this data is very general. It's generally straight lines from landing to landing. You couldn't take this map or the KML data he's pulled together, send a submarine down straight from some point on the map and be able to spot the cable. It's going to take some work.
Re:Svlabard has a 5 TB cable? (Score:4, Informative)
5TB does seem a bit excessive, but perhaps it handles a little bit more then just GPS. Or maybe they figured if they're running wires they might as well put room for growth?
The latter. Only 20 Gb/s is actually used - the rest is dark. But when you're running a 1300km stretch of cable, you may as well throw some extra in there. Far more cost effective than having to do it again in a few years.