Internet's Undersea World

There is no one map I know of that shows every cable system. THERE ARE JUST TOO MANY OF THEM! Verizon has a simple, interractive map of the systems they use. This is also a good map of the current major intercontinental (always wanted to use that word in a sentence!) cable systems.


The best list of all international undersea cable systems shows - by my best count - 288 individual cable systems. And remember, each system may have multiple cables. And each cable has multiple fibers in it. And each fiber, with Dense Wave Division Multiplexing (DWDM), can transfer many point-to-point connections on different lambdas. This takes the capacity of a single undersea fiber system into the Terabits.

The longest undersea cable system in the world - SEA-ME-WE-3 or South-East Asia - Middle East - Western Europe 3 - can transfer over 960 Gbps, close to 1 Tbps. SEA-ME-WE-3 has 39 landing points from Korea to Germany spanning 24,000 miles.

Optical Branching Units allow SEA-ME-ME-3 to drop off connections into countries along its route; such as India, Pakistan, Turkey, and Greece. SEA-ME-WE-3 has been so successful, SEA-ME-WE-4 has been built.

Source: Network World