I spent a few years supporting these from the financial end. Modern cables are built in a loop so that they automatically fail-over. For instance, most Trans-Atlantic cables have pops in New York, Florida, England, and mainland Europe. If there is a cut in one segment, traffic automatically switches to the other.<p>Most customers these days are also on products that mux across these cables. So, if your Trans-Atlantic cable has two simultaneous outages, your traffic would automatically route itself across the Pacific. Your latency would go up, but your service would continue.<p>When I was there, construction was beginning on SMW-4, which had the dubious honor of being the first billion dollar cable. They are typically incorporated via international treaties between states and companies that are roughly about 100 pages long. Each partner has to cover maintenance on the part between the main cable and their drop, while everyone chips in on the main part.<p>It really is fascinating; outages are typically caused by boat anchors close to shore or large earthquakes. Once a guy in Hawai'i cut the Southern Cross wire with a pair of clippers while doing yardwork.
I recommend 'A Thread Across the Ocean: The Heroic Story of the Transatlantic Cable' by John Steele Gordon. [1]<p>From description,<p>"But in 1866, the Old and New Worlds were united by the successful laying of a cable across the Atlantic. John Steele Gordon's book chronicles this extraordinary achievement -- the brainchild of American businessman Cyrus Field and one of the greatest engineering feats of the nineteenth century. An epic struggle, it required a decade of effort, numerous failed attempts, millions of dollars in capital, a near disaster at sea, the overcoming of seemingly insurmountable technological problems, and uncommon physical, financial, and intellectual courage."<p>[1] <a href="http://amzn.com/0060524464" rel="nofollow">http://amzn.com/0060524464</a>
It's interesting to see how much politics weight on the connections. E.g.:<p>1. There more connections between USA and UK than to non-english speaking European countries.<p>2. Venezuela is the only country connecting Cuba.<p>3. Brazil connects with Cape Verde island and will connect with Angola, another portuguese-speaking country. Those will be the only connections crossing south Atlantic.<p>4. Southern Asia connects to Europe circumventing the Middle East by connecting to Egypt and then crossing the mediterranean.
When a telco hired me (they were the owners of the portal I worked for) I got, as a gift, a book with beautiful maps detailing where their fiber network, down to street corner level. I called it the Modern Terrorist Manual.<p>With that book in hand (and I don't know how many copies were actually made) any resourceful bad guy could knock off about 60% of Brazil's phone and data network.
I wonder do they just drop the transatlantic cables blindly over the mid-atlantic ridge and hope for the best or check that it's not a hot spot or something.<p>And four cables connect Alaska to the lower 48? I wonder why.
Some days ago we were discussing about sharks eating these calbes and how Google stops them <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/amitchowdhry/2014/08/15/how-google-stops-sharks-from-eating-undersea-cables/" rel="nofollow">http://www.forbes.com/sites/amitchowdhry/2014/08/15/how-goog...</a>
I imagine you can use wget or curl to download the images (or other batch download tools that let you put in ranges), then ImageMagick to stitch them together. Not too hard, but all command line tools that may take a bit of experimenting to get right.
Does anyone know of a map where I can select two locations and find the shortest path (via submarine cable, obviously) between them?<p>By the way, this is a nice one. Happy to see that I can scroll indefinitely in one direction.
anyone have any idea what happens to user experience when one of these guys breaks? is it a big deal? what about islands who are surviving off of one cable connection?
hey what is the difference between this and <a href="http://submarinecablemap.com/" rel="nofollow">http://submarinecablemap.com/</a> just interactivity?
The lack of interconnect between Africa and South America is interesting. Wouldn't that be a better route with other transatlantic failures than moving to Pacific transit?<p>Surveillance issue?