Submarine Cable map

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The first transcontinental cable was put down in 1858. The cable connected Ireland to Newfoundland. It made possible telegraph transmission between the United Kingdom and Canada.

Though communication was costly and restricted to only several words per hour at best, the speed of the connection was unparalleled at the time.

“Instant” communication was a tremendous commercial hit, and it provoked a cable laying boom. By the year 1900, there were already over 200 thousand kilometers (130 thousand miles) of cable running along the ocean floor.

In 1902, the main line of submarine cables connecting Britain with its colonies looked as follows.

The first transatlantic telephone cables went into service in 1956, and 32 years next, the first fiber optic cable joined Europe and America.

The first internet connections appeared in 1969. Computers of this network were located at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA); American Nonprofit Research Institute (SRI); University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), and the University of Utah. Below is the map of all the Internet connections in 1969.

The first international connection across the Atlantic Ocean appeared in 1973 when University College London (United Kingdom) and Royal Radar Establishment (Norway) joined.

The animated map below shows a boom in submarine cable expansion in the early 2000s, following the increase in internet use worldwide. In 2001 only eight new cables connected to North America and Europe, with more than 74 thousand kilometers of fiber laid.

Following several years of relatively sparse submarine cable development, 2016 ushered in a period of significant global investment in the sector. According to Cisco, total internet traffic for 2016 will exceed a zettabyte (1 zettabyte = 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 bytes). That’s enough capacity to stream approximately 143 billion hours of Netflix video at Ultra HD quality. The animated map below created by Quartz shows the explosive growth of underwater cables from 1990 to 2016.

Cables with a combined construction cost of $7.9 billion entered service between 2016 and 2018. Global bandwidth demand continues to grow, spurring submarine cable network operators to undertake extensive network upgrades and deployments. Globally, demand for international bandwidth increased at a rate of 45 percent in 2018. Operators invest an additional $5.9 billion in new cables expected to enter service in 2019 and 2020.

Today, there are over 420 submarine cables in service, extending over 1.1 million kilometers (700 thousand miles) around the globe. The cable network is centered around information economy hotspots like New York City and Singapore, but cables connect to just about everywhere. Small remote Pacific islands and even distant ocean towns in the Arctic Circle have such connections.

Submarine cable map 2020

Early versions of the map of the submarine cables: 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019

And finally, below is an excellent 3D map of our planet’s submarine fiber optic cable network created by Reddit user tylermw8.