It's interesting that most countries have a single entry point (near the capital city), or only a few. One big exception is Chile that has a cable that goes along the cost and reach many cities. I a similar pattern in the east of Brazil and both sides of New Guinea.
its interesting that there seem to be cables connecting locations on the North Alaska caost, but nowhere else. I would have thought those locations would be too remote for land based connections, unless there is fiber running from Prudhoe Bay along the oil pipeline south.
All the way back to the early days of the cable industry in the 1800s, it was easier and safer to lay a cable along the coast of undeveloped countries than to try and run a landline on poles across rugged terrain. Both coasts of Central and South America had telegraph cables running down them, with spurs for inland connections. Same with Africa.
Here's a map on my cable history website showing the network in 1902:
https://atlantic-cable.com/Maps/1901-Berne-Map-BPL-Leventhal...
At ~1 cable per 1M pop they are probably leaving most countries behind them in a cable/person ratio, being topped only by the transit hubs in the pacific.
Little need, it's essentially all government run bases down there and they get their internet through various satellite links. You could maybe run one to McMurdo Station since it's on solid land and by a bay but there's just not enough data to justify the cost.
There's land adjacent to many of these cables. It is cheaper to bury cables in water -- there's a lot fewer shovels needed and fewer property disputes.
The ship only hit the grounds on the sides where it's less deep, but the cables probably go through the middle area where it's the deepest. So there wasn't much of a chance for the ship to damage any cables.
Indeed, especially for those few spots seemingly in the middle of the ocean where the cables converge it would be interesting to know what land masses (if any) are nearby. Right now this is very difficult to see.
I actually think there's a real unique and distinctive visualization caused by this decision. We're typically very geo-politically focused when we look to evaluate this sort information, but think about it without differentiating between land and ocean, without countries or borders. Think of nodes and edges in a graph, with the size/volume of edges weighing priority. Totally different way to view "earth".
You can find the FLAG cable referenced in the article on this map. The easiest landmark for finding it is the narrow section of the Malay peninsula. Stephenson spends some time in the article covering the overland construction there.
It’s amazing to see that we are essentially just having one huge LAN party. I wonder if the inventors of the phone or internet could have ever imagined this. Now with low orbit satellites connecting the world too, the innovation is incredible on this planet.
For me the most fascinating thing about this is vast distances through Pacific covered with the cables. One would assume it would be easier to cover the distance around Pacific and not directly through the middle of it, but it seems those milliseconds are truly precious.
It's interesting that there are so many cables running through the Suez Canal. I wonder if it's because of geopolitical reasons for avoiding going over land through the Middle East.
Well, it's also easier to run a cable underwater. As far as I know, the cables are literally just laid down there. You can't just lay a cable on land. You've got to bury it or elevate it on poles. I wonder how they deal with dredging the canal, though.
Likewise, what's the "benefit" of spreading the cables out by a few kilometers when space allows? If you zoom in you can see all the cables scrunched through the canal, but on more than one occasion they are fanned out to spread evenly across the given space. Likely it is only a visual eyecandy in the way this map was created, and not a true indication of the cable formations... but I tried looking for some answers on https://www.iscpc.org and gave up. I would assume once a suitable cable path is found, most subsequent cables would be laid right alongside for higher chance of success avoiding coral/trenches/etc.
edit: The more I look at the map, the more it becomes clear these lines do not indicate true cable locations. The lines are too perfect... even for fiber optics. The ocean floor is a treacherous beast!
per another comment[0], it's cheaper to just stay in the water unless you specifically want to attach to a land network. I don't have the knowledge the other commenter seems to have, but that certainly seems believable to me.
Is there any map of land cables ? I know more about the few submarine cables between south and north america than how the internet actually arrives to inland cities of my state.
working at a tier one telco. we have very precise maps of our ground fibers. physical location is usually down to +-10cm. length of fiber even takes into account any coiled up parts. if a contractor wants to dig anywhere, then they have the responsibility to query a national database before digging. if they break our cable, then we have active monitoring (reflecting a laser in a spare fiber, off the break, calculating length to break) this interfaces with our map software, so we can tell within half a meter where the cable is broken. in most cases we end up suing the contractor for the cost of repair and any SLA payments.
to my knowledge no public maps exist, that will give you a full picture.
There's another one that appears to run through the Gulf of Mexico to the US as well (looks like AL or LA to TX), so I suspect it's surprisingly cheaper and/or easier to get policy approval.
Land almost everywhere comes with ownership issues which can be problematic for installing cables. The ocean is generally unambiguously nationally owned, and so it's much simpler to seek permission from a single source (government) than many sources (owners).
I'm not sure about the Suez, but is the reason why there are almost 0 cables running on the African continent and instead there being several cables laid around the coast.
As far as I can tell, there aren't that many cable running through the actual canal, instead they cross over Egypt before the canal starts or terminate in Suez: https://ibb.co/NyVXtST
There’s some interesting military history and tech regarding submarine cables. The first act of WW1 was to sever a cable, for example. And during the Cold War the Americans planted bugs on Russian cables and were eventually exposed by a spy. Nowadays the Russians have some interesting capabilities that can be inferred.
Some years ago I was contacted by the descendants of an English engineer who was working at the Long Island NY cable station of the German Atlantic cable via the Azores at the start of WWI.
Back in the 1950s a family member had recorded him on open reel tape reminiscing about his experiences, and this was later converted to audio cassettes. They sent me the tapes, and I cleaned up the audio for them, and they gave me permission to post the transcription and audio on my site.
Turned out he was actually watching the signals coming in from a German operator when the cable was cut by the Brits, and he talks about this on one of the tapes.
This might be a stupid question, but is it implicit that these "submarine cables" are all fiber cables? If so, are they of similar or very different bandwidths? I would think there are cables of differing ages that are used for different things, or are all non-fiber cables taken out of service long ago, or are they just not included on the map?
Also, the "Polar Express" cable on that map is fascinating, but it seems like it's not planned to be completed until 2026.[1]
I strongly doubt there are any non-fiber submarine cables. Fiber's main strength is range; trying to run signals over electrical conductors over hundred-km-plus distances is not cost-effective and hasn't been for decades.
(It's been done historically, but with very heavy cables, very high endpoint power levels, lots of repeaters, and really poor throughput.)
> I strongly doubt there are any non-fiber submarine cables.
I strongly doubt electrical cables are fiber cables for example :-)
On a more serious note, I was thinking that there are perhaps copper cables used for telephone communications that are still used simply because they haven't yet failed, but I assume fiber has perhaps been the standard for backbones long before it became something people have in their homes.
Wouldn't it make sense for some electrical cables to have some fiber in them? When you're already laying them, you could get two services for the price of one.
I suppose it would, I guess I'm just wondering for how long fiber cables have been the standard, and if there are any operational cables from the time before that. I'm pretty sure there are plenty of cables dedicated for one purpose (e.g. electricity only) that do not contain fiber simply because there wasn't a need or requirement when it was planned.
edit: Here's an example:
> The world record from 1994, for the longest HVDC cable with the highest capacity, was equalled in 2000 with the successful completion of the Swedish-Polish HVDC transmission link between Sweden and Poland:
> 1. Stretching over 250 km, it is one of the two longest submarine HVDC cables ever laid.
> 2. At 600 MW, the cable is one of the most powerful HVDC cables in commercial operation.
> 3. At 450 kV DC, this cable together with the cable between Sweden and Germany, has the highest voltage rating of all existing submarine HVDC cables.
This cable doesn't seem to have any other purpose than transferring electricity, and it was installed "only" 21 years ago.
I highly doubt it's cost-effective. These things are complicated and have specialized equipment. The endpoints also very different for data and electricity.
2) AFAIK most submarine cables are systems — e.g. a ring the connects various places so that there are two paths between points — so trying to plan one to that co-opts existing bits of fiber piggy-backed on power probably wouldn't be easy. Also you'd have the issue of dealing with different generations of fiber, standards, etc.
[1] On reading this it turns out that modern fibers actually carry power as well so that repeaters en route can be powered.
In almost all conceivable contexts, no. If you've ever done any work with electrical code, you are familiar with the spacing requirements between electrical conduit and data wires to prevent magnetic interference: at least a foot apart, and perpendicular crossings if crossings are necessary. The voltage on underwater electrical cables are quite high, as is the bandwidth on underwater data cables, so you definitely can't have them mixing if you want anything near optimum results on data transfer.
Optical fibres are also pretty good sensors so it's not unlikely that some fibres are added just for sensing purposes (they are eput into lots of bridges and other things for example). That said it highly depends on the length of your electrical cables if putting in fibre for communications makes sense. Typically (grossly simplified) you need optical amplifiers when you go significantly over transmission distances of 100km so they need power supplies, take up quite a bit of space etc..
They probably already had some inside but not for general use, but to exchange data between the two ends of the cable. Modern power grid is smart, and it has data connection along side power, they do that also on overhead power lines (the upper cable beside the three phases serves as a protectoin from lightning strikes but also has a fiber inside). In practice the power network also has a completely isolated LAN (for obvious security reasons) to manage the whole infrastructure. At least in my country it's done like that.
Doesn't a lot of these cables pre-date fiber? They had these in WWII. I remember the Gilligan's Island episode where the cable washes up in the lagoon and the professor was able to connect up a phone so they call around the world -- of course Gilligan screws it all up at the end.
But weren't the British Empire's undersea telegraph lines all copper? They lay the first transatlantic cable in 1858, connecting Ireland and Newfoundland. By 1911 their worldwide undersea network was completed, with so much redundancy that 49 cuts would have been necessary to isolate the United Kingdom from its empire.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Red_Line
None of that stuff is still in service. (At least not telecom.) They require periodic, expensive maintenance, and fiber outclasses copper for long-distance signatures to a much greater degree than for the last-mile ground traffic for which copper is still used.
> I strongly doubt there are any non-fiber submarine cables.
not for telecom, not anymore, but a number of submarine cable laying ships are equipped specifically for laying high voltage power cables to offshore wind farms. And for things like high voltage cables linking medium sized islands to a nearby mainland (eg: Vancouver Island, BC to the continent).
After submarine telecom, the biggest uses for such vessels are offshore power and the oil/gas industry.
Some coaxial lines were laid until the 1980s. Seems likely that at least one small island somewhere has a copper submarine cable supplying their data/phone needs still. But it's decidedly obsolete, yes.
Current fiber-containing submarine cables also have electrical lines to power inline amplifiers. Even fiber signals can't travel those kinds of distances without repeaters.
Copper communications cable were in use from 1850 until the 1980s, when they were replaced one by one with fiber.
Almost all the copper cables ever laid are still in the depths of the ocean, as it's not worth salvaging them except near shore. A few of the more recent copper cables are still operational, but they are used only for scientific research.
That’s true for communication cables though, so what about cables for electricity? That’s mostly what my original comment was about, that the title seems to imply any submarine cable is automatically a data cable.
Not all of these lines go across the ocean. If you're trying to move power between São Paolo and Beunos Aries, it might be cheaper to lay a sea cable than to deal with all the terrain, land rights and borders involved in an overland route.
There is (if it has not been scuppered by brexit) Icelink, a project to connect Iceland to the UK. The rationale, as usual, is mismatched supply and demand, where the supply is green geothermal power.
Electricity is just that much cheaper in some places than others. Bauxite is shipped far across the ocean to places with cheap electricity for the energy-intensive process of refining it into aluminum. Sometimes it makes more sense to ship the electricity instead. Here in Canada, I pay like 20% of what the Japanese pay and 10% what the Danish pay for electricity. If we could figure out a way to export our hydroelectric wealth to regions like Europe and Asia, it could help climate change. High-temperature superconductors don't get enough research, IMO.
they do get enough research, unfortunately they are some of the most complex physical systems and we still haven’t figured out why exactly they superconduct (i used to work on this).
There are high voltage submarine cables for electrical power - these are used to cross rivers and lakes, for example. International cables, like the ones between the UK and the European mainland, are used for load balancing.
As it's difficult technically to transmit electrical power over a subsea cable (and exponentially more difficult at the length increases), these cables have limited application. There's over a million kilometers (~600,000 miles) of fiber optic communications cable around the world right now, and perhaps a thousand or so miles of power cable, so "submarine cable" without any qualifier almost always refers to communications cables.
When I lived in the Cayman Islands, the primary submarine cable (I forget its name) was fiber, and I had better net there than I had in the US. It went down for a week or two one time, and the entire island's net traffic was relegated to a much older copper cable that ran to Jamaica. Cayman is a tiny market, but it still crippled our net because the bandwidth was tiny; it was like a couple T1s for the whole population.
Yes operating a non fibre cable is too expensive and does not make sense. Fibre cables on the other hand have remained operational over a long time. AFAIK there are no fibre cables using electro optic repeaters operational anymore. But the earliest fibres which used optical amplification are still operational. This is the beauty about fibre communication. You largely only need to upgrade the endpoints to increase your throughput.
I found a couple that have interesting or creative names - Bifrost, Polar Express, Apollo, Grace Hopper, Amerigo Vespucci. Most of them are pretty dry by comparison, which feels like a missed opportunity.
There’s not a lot of content to be exchanged between Siberia and Alaska. And running long stretches of fiber over land is actually more costly and subject to failure than under the sea, so going from Moscow -> Vladivostok (or something) over land, then going subsea, and then Alaska -> West-coast US over land, is not really beneficial.
Wow, not sure how useful that is (standard caveat about choropleths and density vs raw numbers) but very impressive! Even the text overlays work nicely.
The two critiques I have of the OP link are solved in this one:
- The land/water contrast and the dark/light should be inverted
- Zoom speed is terrible in the OP link, but much better in this map
Given the population is always under 10k, and it doesn't serve as an interconnection point for any further points along the way (unlike e.g. Hawaii or Guam), it's just not worth it, apparently.
173 comments
[ 6.8 ms ] story [ 137 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amundsen%E2%80%93Scott_South_P...
https://www.convergencialatina.com/News-Detail/324197-3-8-Da...
The Suez telecom connections run overland.
Mother Earth Mother Board
>The hacker tourist ventures forth across the wide and wondrous meatspace of three continents, chronicling the laying of the longest wire on Earth.
https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/
edit: The more I look at the map, the more it becomes clear these lines do not indicate true cable locations. The lines are too perfect... even for fiber optics. The ocean floor is a treacherous beast!
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28642764
to my knowledge no public maps exist, that will give you a full picture.
It's not entirely uncommon to route cables from and to your own country through the water, apparently: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_domestic_submarine_c...
http://www.hisutton.com/Undersea_Cables.html
Back in the 1950s a family member had recorded him on open reel tape reminiscing about his experiences, and this was later converted to audio cassettes. They sent me the tapes, and I cleaned up the audio for them, and they gave me permission to post the transcription and audio on my site.
Turned out he was actually watching the signals coming in from a German operator when the cable was cut by the Brits, and he talks about this on one of the tapes.
The story and short audio file are on my site: https://atlantic-cable.com/CableStories/Claypoole/index.htm
Also, the "Polar Express" cable on that map is fascinating, but it seems like it's not planned to be completed until 2026.[1]
[1]: https://www.submarinenetworks.com/en/systems/asia-europe-afr...
(It's been done historically, but with very heavy cables, very high endpoint power levels, lots of repeaters, and really poor throughput.)
I strongly doubt electrical cables are fiber cables for example :-)
On a more serious note, I was thinking that there are perhaps copper cables used for telephone communications that are still used simply because they haven't yet failed, but I assume fiber has perhaps been the standard for backbones long before it became something people have in their homes.
edit: Here's an example:
> The world record from 1994, for the longest HVDC cable with the highest capacity, was equalled in 2000 with the successful completion of the Swedish-Polish HVDC transmission link between Sweden and Poland:
> 1. Stretching over 250 km, it is one of the two longest submarine HVDC cables ever laid.
> 2. At 600 MW, the cable is one of the most powerful HVDC cables in commercial operation.
> 3. At 450 kV DC, this cable together with the cable between Sweden and Germany, has the highest voltage rating of all existing submarine HVDC cables.
This cable doesn't seem to have any other purpose than transferring electricity, and it was installed "only" 21 years ago.
1) Modern communications fibers are complicated (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_communications_cable [1]) and presumably expensive so speculatively adding them to power cables would likely be a pricey endeavor.
2) AFAIK most submarine cables are systems — e.g. a ring the connects various places so that there are two paths between points — so trying to plan one to that co-opts existing bits of fiber piggy-backed on power probably wouldn't be easy. Also you'd have the issue of dealing with different generations of fiber, standards, etc.
[1] On reading this it turns out that modern fibers actually carry power as well so that repeaters en route can be powered.
500 MW electricity interconnector + bonus 12 core fire cable
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basslink#Basslink_Telecoms
not for telecom, not anymore, but a number of submarine cable laying ships are equipped specifically for laying high voltage power cables to offshore wind farms. And for things like high voltage cables linking medium sized islands to a nearby mainland (eg: Vancouver Island, BC to the continent).
After submarine telecom, the biggest uses for such vessels are offshore power and the oil/gas industry.
https://www.nationalgrid.com/our-businesses/national-grid-ve...
https://askjaenergy.com/2018/04/17/icelink-in-operation-by-2...
The idea of connecting solar farms in the Sahara to Europe under the Mediterranean is also perennially in the air, with the same rationale as Icelink.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_power_cable#Operatio...
Anyone have one that shows the land cables connecting the undersea ones? I’d like to see how (and which) traffic gets to my particular inland city.
Though I supposed the latest commit is to use live data from Telegeography
[1]: https://he.net/3d-map/
[2]: of course, today the desktop I'm using doesn't support WebGL and I can't see the submarine filter on my phone. YMMV
Given the population is always under 10k, and it doesn't serve as an interconnection point for any further points along the way (unlike e.g. Hawaii or Guam), it's just not worth it, apparently.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27410133