Do you ever wonder how we get internet to everywhere? Do you wonder how we can communicate with people on every continent? Look no further than the submarine cable map (click this link for a dynamic version of the map)!

This map is put together by the company TeleGeography, a company that “collects and analyzes data on the way the world connects”. Do you have your own map project? TeleGeography can help here!

Frequently Asked Questions

TeleGeography provides a really interesting FAQ around this Submarine Cable Map. Here are a few of the more interesting ones, directly from TeleGeography’s FAQ:

How many cables are there?

As of early 2020, there are approximately 406 submarine cables in service around the world.

The total number of cables is constantly changing as new cables enter service and older cable are decommissioned.

How do cables work?

Modern submarine cables use fiber-optic technology. Lasers on one end fire at extremely rapid rates down thin glass fibers to receptors at the other end of the cable. These glass fibers are wrapped in layers of plastic (and sometimes steel wire) for protection. 

How thick are undersea cables?

For most of its journey across the ocean, a cable is typically as wide as a garden hose. The filaments that carry light signals are extremely thin — roughly the diameter of a human hair.

These fibers are sheathed in a few layers of insulation and protection. Cables laid nearer to shore use extra layers of armoring for enhanced protection.

Do the cables actually lie on the bottom of the ocean floor?

Yes, cables go all the way down. Nearer to the shore cables are buried under the seabed for protection, which explains why you don’t see cables when you go the beach, but in the deep sea they are laid directly on the ocean floor.

Of course, considerable care is taken to ensure cables follow the safest path to avoid fault zones, fishing zones, anchoring areas, and other dangers. To reduce inadvertent damage, the undersea cable industry also spends a lot of time educating other marine industries on the location of cables.

Who owns these cables?

Cables were traditionally owned by telecom carriers who would form a consortium of all parties interested in using the cable. In the late 1990s, an influx of entrepreneurial companies built lots of private cables and sold off the capacity to users.

Both the consortium and private cable models still exist today, but one of the biggest changes in the past few years is the type of companies involved in building cables.

Content providers such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon are major investors in new cable. The amount of capacity deployed by private network operators – like these content providers – has outpaced internet backbone operators in recent years. Faced with the prospect of ongoing massive bandwidth growth, owning new submarine cables makes sense for these companies.

How much information can a cable carry?

Cable capacities vary a lot. Typically, newer cables are capable of carrying more data than cables laid 15 years ago. The new MAREA cable is capable of carrying 208 Tbps (Terabits per second).

There are two principal ways of measuring a cable’s capacity:
Potential capacity is the total amount of capacity that would be possible if the cable’s owner installed all available equipment at the ends of the cable. This is the metric most cited in the press.

Lit capacity is the amount of capacity that is actually running over a cable. This figure simply provides another capacity metric. Cable owners rarely purchase and install the transmission equipment to fully realize a cable’s potential from day one. Because this equipment is expensive, owners instead prefer to upgrade their cable gradually, as customer demand dictates. 

Don’t these cables ever break?

Yes! Cable faults are common. On average, there are over 100 each year.

You rarely hear about these cable faults because most companies that use cables follow a “safety in numbers” approach to usage, spreading their networks’ capacity over multiple cables so that if one breaks, their network will run smoothly over other cables while service is restored on the damaged one.

Accidents like fishing vessels and ships dragging anchors account for two-thirds of all cable faults. Environmental factors like earthquakes also contribute to damage. Less commonly, underwater components can fail. Deliberate sabotage and shark bites are exceedingly rare.

Read the rest of the FAQ here!