Monday, October 7, 2024

How Many Submarine Cables Are There, Anyway?

TeleGeography’s Submarine Cable Map just lately hit a brand new milestone: depicting over 600 cable programs.

As of September 2024, that’s a whopping 532 in-service programs, with one other 77 deliberate.

The variety of cable programs we research is consistently growing. This is because of huge funding on this infrastructure—each alongside main routes and to small islands—in addition to our ongoing efforts to trace world programs in additional element. 

The variety of in-service programs is larger now than in every other yr inside the final 20 years.

What’s included on this depend?

We concentrate on publicly-known communications programs; undersea strains solely devoted to energy transmission, analysis networks, and personal authorities use are excluded. As soon as cables are retired, we take away them from our on-line map.

Final yr, I had the possibility to hitch my colleague Greg Bryan on TeleGeography Explains the Web to speak via the cable-tracking course of.

You’ll be able to hearken to the total episode over right here.

What can we imply by cable programs?

The variety of cable programs we monitor is totally different from the whole point-to-point connections proven on the map.

The variety of cable programs we monitor is totally different from the whole point-to-point connections proven on the map.

Every cable system is uniquely designed to suit its capability necessities and native geography. As such, it might include a number of segments or branches, as do over half of the programs on our map.

The distinction between cable programs and segments is most simply demonstrated within the Atlantic. Though there are solely 13 in-service trans-Atlantic cable programs, 17 segments truly cross this route.

That is made doable by programs like Vodafone’s Apollo, which celebrated its twentieth birthday final yr. Apollo connects the U.S., France, and the U.Okay. via two parallel paths—one North, the opposite South, and every with their very own pair of touchdown stations.

Apollo Cable

Interactive map followers will probably be conversant in our month-to-month cable trivia. We just lately requested map viewers to ponder the common variety of landings per system on the map. Our winner acknowledged the complexity of subsea system design by accurately guessing not two, not three, however 5!

Together with a recent trivia query, our staff rolled out some new map options this month. Customers can now:

  • Search by area and route. Navigate to the brand new Area and Route pages by typing Linked to [region name] or Linked to [route name] within the search area.
  • Filter choices by a variety of RFS years. A brand new Filter button is on the market within the sidebar on Area, Nation, Touchdown Level, Route, and Provider pages that return an inventory of three or extra cables. 

Head over to submarinecablemap.com to take pleasure in these updates.

 

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