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Greg's Cable Map is a treasure trove of information about the Internet's layout
The Internet runs on cables. I mean, yes, you've got all those massive servers, but without the cables, they're not worth much. That's a fact which is pretty easy to forget. At the end of the day, all of our futuristic Web 2.0 stuff is just running on a bunch of physical cables, stretching from continent to continent, somewhere deep down at the bottom of the ocean.
Greg's Cable Map provides more than a glimpse into this fascinating world of underwater cables. You don't see the stuff within each continent. It just shows you the interconnections that make the Internet truly global.
In the screenshot above, you see a ton of connections going into the Eastern seaboard. So, that's a lot of physical redundancy right there, which is great for the US. (Let's not forget that the US is pretty much the hub of this whole Internet thing.)
Not all countries are so fortunate, though. If you scroll around the map a little bit, you'll soon discover that some countries and islands are connected via just one or two undersea cables. The thought is mind-boggling; just one or two very thin (relative to their length) cables, stretching on for thousands of miles, is all that connects a whole country to the World Wide Web. Whoa!
Some countries have satellite uplinks too, but the bandwidth is negligible compared to what the undersea cables offer. Speaking of bandwidth – the map includes the capacity of each underwater link, so you can figure out how much bandwidth an entire continent or country is getting. It's pretty impressive stuff.
Comments
6
Subscribe to commentsColorblindMonkSep 10th 2010 3:38PM
Man, that's a lot of tubes.
kojo87Sep 10th 2010 7:37PM
and this whole time i thought the internet was just a big truck
daveSep 10th 2010 3:55PM
A few years back Wired ran an article about the laying of underwater cable: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html Though it is a long read, it is a good one.
bbourgeois87Sep 12th 2010 1:30PM
This made me wonder... with recent concerns about "Cyber wars" such as NKorea hacking US infrastructure, couldn't the overseas connections be terminated to make the attacker impotent? Physically disconnect the cables or cut through them? Easy peasy fix... That or put all important infrastructure on a separate, highly secure network with much more limited access.
The US would still have to worry about foreign agents inside the US carrying out the attack, but they'd be much easier to stop than if they were in NKorea, for example.
Of course, if that defense was used the rest of the world would pretty much be SOL, unless most popular US internet sites have servers in Europe as well...
RoyalKnightSep 13th 2010 5:29PM
Sometimes when I have discussions with people on Internet infrastructure, security, and overall Internet network load, they tend to forget the fact that the Internet has a very physical form (and that it physically costs money to plan, create, and maintain this infrastructure).
When cables or routers give out, connections get lost and rerouted, which causes severe network congestion more often than we'd like. (There was this one notable incident in the past that cut off a good portion of Asia from a direct connection to Europe... and the alternate routes were so badly congested that many people I knew that were affected just stopped trying to surf the Internet for a few days.)
It's sad that so many people still cling to the belief that the Internet is unlimited entity, and base their arguments on its extremes.
RoyalKnightSep 13th 2010 5:29PM
From what I remember reading about the topic, China and their Great Firewall has given rise to an environment that promotes Chinese services, Chinese infrastructure, and Chinese content (ignoring government censorship and approval right now for the sake of this argument). While it's not quite there yet, this points in the direction of a separate Chinese Internet that would still be usable by Chinese should China get cut off from the rest of the world (whether it be by their own decision or not).
Some person (that I forgot, since I read about this some time ago) made the prediction that other national entities might inevitably fall into that same pattern, for reasons that would include maintaining quality of service (bandwidth), safeguarding their physical network infrastructure (connectivity), or protection from countries that purposefully conduct cyber attacks on other nations (security).
There's a lot of cable trunk lines still going around, and if it came down to it, it's not particularly hard to physically sever the connections rid of them. Attacking the network infrastructure between, say, France and Germany in would be a lot harder, as it would physically be on European Union soil, as opposed to a five billion mile cable stretching across the middle of the ocean.