You may reach the internet via wireless
connection most of the time, but all those ones and zeros cross the oceans the
same way old-fashioned telephone connections did: by undersea cables. The map masters at TeleGeography have charted the course the internet
takes to cross the seas in 2014, and the result is fascinatingly complex.
Zooming in on the
interactive map reveals some
interesting conclusions. Australia and Alaska, by virtue of their remoteness,
are served by a scant few connections, while the heart of Europe is a
complicated tangle of internet tubes. 263 of these cables are currently active,
with 22 more poised to come online by 2015. If you're a serious cartography
fan, you can even order a $250
print to hang in your map room.
The 2014 edition includes 263 cables that are lit (in service),
and 22 that should be lit by the end of 2015, so 285 cable systems in total.
Last year’s map showed 244 cables, and the year before that just 150, so the
cable-laying boom of a few years back has definitely slowed down.
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Unfortunately, this year’s edition lacks a neat feature of
Telegeography’s 2012 and 2013 maps, which was a breakdown of how much of the
cable systems’ capacity is actually being used. It also doesn’t have the 2013
edition’s Olde Worlde appeal. On the plus side, it does offer a good breakdown
of cable faults over recent years, cable-laying ships and maintenance zones, if
that’s your thing.
One cable system that’s not on the map, probably because it will
only go live in 2016, is the Asia Africa Europe-1 (AAE-1) AAE-1 will run from
South-East Asia to Africa and Europe via the Middle East, and yesterday the
backing consortium announced membership including the likes of China Unicom,
PCCW, Etisalat and Ooredoo.
Turns out,
supplying the world with a virtual internet involves a lot of serious
infrastructure in some hard-to-reach places. It makes you appreciate the modern
miracle that lets you blast an email halfway around the globe with the click of
a mouse.
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