Ever wondered how your email can cross the vastness of the ocean and be delivered almost instantly, anywhere in the world? It’s all down to a network of fibre-optic cables that link up the continents and transmit terabits of data every second.
Thanks to TeleGeography, a US telecommunications research firm, you can now view these submarine cables on an interactive map and get a sense of the physical infrastructure that keeps the internet going.
The map shows 188 active and planned submarine cables, along with their landing points. Clicking a cable gives you more information, such as its name, its length, who owns it and where it meets land. Clicking a landing point will also tell you which cables terminate at that location.
The map is only a stylised representation, so the real cables and landing points may lie in slightly different locations. That should protect cables from thieves, who have caused communications outages in south-east Asia, but it won’t help ships avoid breaking cables by dropping anchor.