The deep web: Incredible new map of the undersea cables that keep 99 per cent of the world clicking

The deep web: Incredible new map of the undersea cables that keep 99 per cent of the world clicking


The only time the world is even aware
of the undersea cables that carry internet signals around the world is
when they are cut off - such as when a cable connecting Europe to the
Middle East failed last year, or when a trailing ship's anchor cut
through a cable under the Indian ocean.
Now,
a new interactive map from Telegeography should help ships to steer
clear of the multi-billion-dollar network of high-power cables through
which 99 per cent of global internet traffic travels.



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Broadband under the sea: The cables that connect the continents

The
map - using info from the Global
Bandwidth Research Service - shows the position of cables (both planned
ones and ones currently on the sea bed), and lets you know their landing
stations, who owns them, how long they are, and when they'll come into
operation if they are not already. The version on Telegeography's site
lets you click on any cable who find out more.

Tim
Stronge, of Telegeography, who created the map, says, 'Submarine cables
are very expensive to build (generally ranging from $100m - $500m) but
they deliver a huge amount of capacity.'





'Some of the older cables
deliver only 20 Gbps - most of the new ones can deliver several terabits
(terabit = 1,000 gigabit) of capacity,' says Stronge - home internet
connections are typically between one and 50 megabits per second (a
megabit being 1/1000th of a gigabit.


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The Apollo cable - hidden under a Cornish beach - is one of Britain's main connections to America




'Each cable costs about
$10m a year in maintenance costs -- the price operators have to pay to
keep repair ships on standby, and other costs. If a cable breaks (which
happens surprisingly frequently), the owner(s) of the cable also have
to pay a repair ship to go out to sea and splice the cable, to the tune
of $10,000 per day.'



The cables themselves are often not
much wider than garden hoses and contain fibre-optic lines which can
each contain bandwidth for up to 20 million people.


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New cables such as Apollo offer speeds in
'terabits' per second - each terabit is 1,000 gigabits, in turn 1,000
megabits. Home connections are often as slow one megabit





One cable between the US and the UK carries 3.2 terabits of data per second - the 7,600 mile journey takes 0.00072 seconds.
Data
on newer, hi-tech internet cables is 'flashed' down the lines by
high-powered lasers, and the intensity is maintained by electrical
repeaters costing up to £1 million each. An electrical cable runs
parallel to the fibre-optic line to power the repeaters.

Failures
can be catastrophic. One cable failure - between Sicily and Egypt -
left more than 50 per cent of India without power in 2008, sending the
country's computer industry and stock markets offline for hours.