Everything about undersea cabling is fascinating. Here's a video of powering up an undersea cables's repeaters: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2zDrUz9lgY" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2zDrUz9lgY</a> (it takes about 30 mins to fully ramp up an undersea cable).<p>And of course the obligatory video showing how they load a submarine cable onto a ship <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1JEuzBkOD8" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1JEuzBkOD8</a>
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:<p><a href="http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=sean+gorman+critical+infrastructure&btnG=&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C33&as_vis=1" rel="nofollow">http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=sean+gorman+critical+inf...</a>
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": <a href="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html</a>
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.
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?
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).
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.
It's very interesting to see the void through the Northwest passage (North of Canada).<p>It won't be like that for long: <a href="http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2012-03/thawing-northwest-passage-will-allow-new-fiber-optic-link-between-uk-and-japan" rel="nofollow">http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2012-03/thawing-nor...</a>
I'm very please to see them listing Atlantic Emerald Express on here in addition to gregs cable map(<a href="http://www.cablemap.info/" rel="nofollow">http://www.cablemap.info/</a>). 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.