Perfect occasion to point to the absolutely wonderful article "Mother Earth Mother Board" 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' - Neal Stephenson.<p><a href="http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html" rel="nofollow">http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html</a><p>(Quite a long read though: over 40k words.)
To anyone visiting the UK who finds this sort of thing interesting, I recommend Porthcurno Telegraph Museum. <a href="http://www.porthcurno.org.uk" rel="nofollow">http://www.porthcurno.org.uk</a>
Do the gray wires mean anything special? There are a lot going to the north pole.<p>Also I see no one has bothered hooking up Antarctica. (I always thought that would be a good place for a data center in light of free cooling.)
Also interesting is the Level 3 Network Map: <a href="http://maps.level3.com/default/" rel="nofollow">http://maps.level3.com/default/</a>
I'm curious why none of the cables go through the Gulf of Mexico into Texas (or somewhere around there)? There are many datacenters around Texas, I'd think it would make sense to have some cables going there to speed things up, or maybe I'm wrong?
<a href="http://subtelforum.com/articles/products/submarine-cable-almanac/" rel="nofollow">http://subtelforum.com/articles/products/submarine-cable-alm...</a> is another great resource for submarine cable aficionados.
What costs less, laying and operating cable underwater or over mountains? That is, what are the relative costs of land and submarine cables for long distances?<p>Looking at the runs that follow the coasts of South America, SE Asia, and northern Canada, I wonder why some of them weren't run over land. (Obviously very many cables do run over land; this map only shows submarine cables.)<p>In my imagination, it seems easier to drop a cable from big spool on a ship than to run it over mountains, for example, but I really have no idea.
Is there a way to sort this by capacity, completion date, and other metrics? I'd love to see a timeline view of how submarine cable capacity has changed over the last decade.
There's also a project that attempts to map which AWS region is closest to a country via undersea cable information: <a href="https://github.com/turnkeylinux/aws-datacenters" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/turnkeylinux/aws-datacenters</a>
I'd love it if someone made a Mini-Metro-like game, but instead of building a subway in a city, you're trying to wire a planet.<p><a href="http://dinopoloclub.com/minimetro/" rel="nofollow">http://dinopoloclub.com/minimetro/</a>
Old news, but it is also worth pointing to Greg's Cable Map: <a href="http://www.cablemap.info" rel="nofollow">http://www.cablemap.info</a>