The internets undersea world

The vast majority of the worlds communications are not carried by satellites but an altogether older technology: cables under the earths oceans. As a ship accidentally wipes out Asias net access, this map shows how we rely on collections of wires of less than 10cm diameter to link us all together

CE RI FA

Fibre-optic submarine cable systems

In-service Planned Damaged
Cables with a minimum capacity of 5 giga bytes a second under construction or working year-end 2007
RussiaJapan Cable Network

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Kodiak Kenai

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At la

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-14 TAT
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Alexandria, Wednesday
A ships anchor accidentally cuts two cables, SeaMeWe4 and FLAG Europe-Asia, reducing internet capacity in Asia by 75%
Brussels Odessa

No rth Al St ar AC ask SA aU las nit ka ed O We re st go n

U ka as Al

Dublin
tlan ia A ern Hib 4 -1 TAT 1 ACtic

d te ni st Ea

Taiwan, 2006

Seattle
HSCS VSNL TGN-Pacic PC-1

VSNL TGN-Western Europe

Southern Cross

FLAG Europe-Asia

SeaMeWe-3

JAPAN

VSNL TGN-Pacic TPC 5 China-U.S. Japan-U.S. TPE

UNITED STATES
Los Angeles

New York
m Ge in iB

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Marseille
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Caucasus Onli
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Site of the previous biggest cable disaster, when under-ocean landslide cut nine cables between Taiwan and the Philippines, disabling net access for weeks

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PACIFIC OCEAN
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FA-1 Apollo 12/1 TAT-

Lisbon
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Athens
KELTRA-2

JAPAN
Pusan

Med

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Cabl e

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Colum

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SA T-3

Shanghai

MA C

Gibraltar
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Algiers

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CHINA
Hong Kong

C2C

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Japan-U .S.
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Gulf of Miami Mexico

ARC OS

ATLANTIC OCEAN

Kuwait City

Kuwait-Iran Qatar-U.A.E.

CHINA
TW1

Shanghai

MAC

BICS Bahamas 2

-II as eric Am 1 mSA

N Intra-Asi

Honolulu
TP C5
TPC 5

Doha Abu Dhabi

SMPR-1
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INDIA
Mumbai Chennai
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C PA

Hong Kong

Taipei

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Fibralink

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Cayman-Jamaica

APCN
Guam
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Manila
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San Juan
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AFRICA
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Muscat
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Euro

FLAG

Europe

-Asia

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ica

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Porto Novo Mogadishu

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TE AM S

Arabian Sea

TGN TIC SeaMeWe-4

EAC

Abidjan
SAO TOME & PRINCIPE

Sou th

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Bharat Lanka Cable System WARF

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Colombo
FLAG
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Euro

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SeaM

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Dumai-Melaka Cable System

Singapore

MIC-1 APCN Matrix Cable System

Libreville

Singapore

Jakarta
JA SU
Australia-Japan

Luanda

SEA

Dar es Salaam

N SAC/LA

FE

SA

SAm-1

Jakarta

INDIAN OCEAN

JA SU

Port Headland
SeaM 3 eWe-

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SAT-3/WASC

Suva Rio de Janeiro

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Cross

Auckland

SA

Sydney

At lan tis SA -2 C/ LA N m1

Internet users aected by the Alexandria accident

The main countries aected in Wednesdays event

SOURCE: TELEGEOGRAPHY.COM SUBMARINE CABLE MAP 2008. INTERNET STATISTICS FROM INTERNETWORLDSTATS.COM

US RA

US RA

ASIA
Maputo

Suva Port Headland

SeaM

AUSTRALIA
Perth

Go

So

uth

ern

Asia has an enormous number of internet users: 501 million of the worlds 1.3 billion users. And its growing by 882% per year

Noumea

AUSTRALIA
Perth Sydney Auckland

3 eWe-

Southern

Cape Town

NEW ZEALAND
World cable capacity
Submarine cable operators light (turn on) capacity on their systems to sell bandwidth to other carriers. Carriers buy extra capacity, mainly to hold in reserve. On the trans-Atlantic route 80% of the bandwidth is purchased, but only 29% is used

NEW ZEALAND
The longest submarine cables
The SeaMeWe-3 system from Norden in Germany to Keoje, South Korea connects 32 dierent countries with 39 landing points SeaMeWe-3 Southern Cross China-US 39,000 km 30,500 km 30,476 km 28,000 km 25,000 km

The worlds cables in bandwidth

The rst intercontinental telephony submarine cable system, TAT-1, connected North America to Europe in 1958 and had an initial capacity of 640,000 bytes per second. Since then, total trans-Atlantic cable capacity has soared to over 7 trillion bps

Cross-section of a cable
Cables of this strength are typically 69 mm in diameter and weigh over 10,000 kilograms a kilometer. In deeper waters, lighter and less insulated cables are used
Galvanised armour wires Tar-soaked nylon yarn Optical bres Silicon gel

60m
India Pakistan

12m

6m
Egypt

4.7m
SaudiArabia UAE

Capacity in terabytes a second

Total capacity

What makes up used capacity?

FLAG Europe-Asia South America-1

1.7m
0.8m
Kuwait

7.1 tbps
Purchased capacity

27%
Private networks, owned by companies

0.3m
Qatar

5.7 tbps
Used capacity

72%
Internet

1%

Telephone calls

0.2m
Bahrain

2.1 tbps

Estimated international bandwidth usage by country (gbps) 1,000+ 200 - 999 50 - 199 1 - 49 1

Buering material (plastic/steel) Nylon yarn bedding Ultra-high strength steel wires

Capacity as of December 2007 (gbps) 500 500 50 10

Copper sheath