The Internet's Undersea World

The internet's undersea world The vast majority of the world's ications are not carried by satellites but an altogether older technology: cables under the earth's oceans, As a shipaccidentally wipes out Asia's net access, this map shows how we rely on collections of wires of less than iocm diameter to link us all together Alexandria, Wednesday A ship's anchor accidentally cuts two cables, SeaMeWe4 and FLAG Europe Asia, reducing internet capacity in Asia by 75% Fibre-optic submarine cable systems Planned Taiwan, 2006 Site of the previous biggest cable disaster, when under-ocean landslide cut nine cables between Taiwan Dumaged Caties ws arivur ay ats gilyte ndase nanuction workng Odess Marseille UNITED STATES and the Philippines, disabling net access for weeks JAPAN New York JAPAN Leushoe PACIFIC OCEAN LAlgiers elos Angeles Gibraltan anghal Kuwait City CHINA ATLANTIC OCEAN CHINA Gulf of Miami Mesico Daha Au Dhab Muscat INDIA Hong Kong AFRICA Dakar Djiboutie Čaracas Acc Perto Nove Cayennee Abidjane Mogadishue akarta Dar es Salaame Luanda INDIAN OCEAN Suvae ASIA Asia has an enormous number of internet users: 501 million of the world's 13 billion users And it's growing by 882% per year Part Headiand Port Headland Noume Rio de Janeire Noumea AUSTRALIA AUSTRALIA Magutoe Perti Perth Sydney +Cape Town Sydney Auckland NEW ZEALAND NEW ZEALAND Internet users affected by the Alexandria accident World cable capacity The longest submarine cables The world's cables in bandwidth Cross-section of a cable Submarine cable operators light (tun on) capacity on their systems to sell bandwidth to other carriers. Carriers buy extra capacity, mainly reserve. On the trans-Atlantic route 80% of the bandwidth is purchased, but only 29% is used The SeaMeWe-3 system from Norden in Germany to Keoje, South Korea connects 32 different countries with 39 landing points The first intercontinental telephony submarine cable system, TAT-1, connected North 1958 and had an in 640,000 bytes per second. Since then, total trans-Atlantic cable capacity has soared to over 7 trillion bps Cables of this strength are typically 69 mm in diameter and weigh over 10,00 The main countries affected in Wednesday's event 60m erica to Europe in dcapacity of KI In dees cables are used SealdeWe-3 39,000 km India Galvanised Southern Cruss amour wires 30,500 km Tar-soaked Chirta-US 30,476 km ndan yam 12m What makes up "used capacity"? Optical fitnes Capacity in terabytes a second FLAG Europe-Asia 28,000 kum Pakistan Silicon gal 6m 4.7m SaudiArahia South America-1 25,000 km Egypt 27% Total capacity 1.7m 7.1 tbps Private networks, owted by compaties UAE 0.8m 72% % Purchased capadty Kuwait 5.7 tbps 0.3m Internet Estimated international bandwidth usage by country Qatar 0.2m Butfering materisi (plastic/stee) thed cucity Bahraln 2.1 tbps O 1,000+ O 200 - 999 O 50 - 199 O1-49 Nyton vam bedding Ultra igh strength steet wres Capacity as of December 2007 (gbps) >500 500 10 Copper shaath