Submarine cables

While I have no direct involvement with underseas fiber infrastructure, I've long been interested in the spread of communications, especially to the developing world, so I've tracked international submarine cable deployments for many years.  Today, I was looking at the new submarine cable directory from the Submarine Telecoms Forum and a friend looking over my shoulder said "Wow, where does that come from?"

So if you also want a brief distraction from your busy day, here are the submarine cable sites I follow:

First is Greg's Cable Map.  This is the personal project of a South African technologist, Greg Mahlknecht.

Most of Greg's initial data came from Wikipedia, which not surprisingly has extensive lists of both international submarine cables and domestic cables (those serving just one country).

But for cable by cable data, with maps, I love the the Submarine Telcoms Forum's Submarine Cable Almanac.  It has detailed data and individual maps for over 200 cables systems.  So where overview maps like Greg's above give you a global picture, SubTelForum's Almanac has per-cable maps like this:

Comments

[TechFlex]

Today this is all quite familiar, but in the 19th century, when the first feeble bits struggled down the first undersea cable joining the Old World to the New.

[Underbid CDC]

Very interesting information about these submarine cables. The map of the cables is pretty cool, I did not imagine that amount of cables.