Interesting that the US and Russia get so close to touching and yet I don't see any cables going between the two countries. All our west coast cables seem to go south to Japan/China/Australia.
I used a similar map ten years ago when teaching a class for gen ed freshman undergraduates about “the internet” (mostly cultural topics with a bit of technical flavor). It’s interesting how things have changed a little since then - for example, there used to be no direct link between South America and Africa (a fact that we confirmed in my class with a traceroute). Now there are four cables.
The submarine cable map was consistently a student favorite and a big “wow” moment in the class. Many of them said they had thought all the Internet traffic went over satellite.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 23.0 ms ] thread- 6 Oct 2022: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33110478> (175pts, 62 comments
- 7 Nov 2020: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25020431> (235pts, 135 comments
https://web.archive.org/web/20151029000518/https://www.wired...
The submarine cable map was consistently a student favorite and a big “wow” moment in the class. Many of them said they had thought all the Internet traffic went over satellite.
A Technical Update on Submarine Cables [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45119310 - Sept 2025 (17 comments)
Microsoft Azure: "Multiple international subsea cables were cut in the Red Sea"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45152773