The physical internet · works offline
The copper and glass.
Nearly everything the internet carries crosses an ocean inside a cable about as thick as a garden hose. This chart draws all of them — 701 systems, 1,921 landing stations, close to two million stated kilometres — on the site’s own canvas: no tiles, no map provider, no network requests at all. The whole dataset ships with the page.
It is the illustrative sibling of THE ROUTING TABLE: that page is the logical internet — who announces what — and this is the physical one. Every cable is a desk: its length, its owners, where it lands, and the year it entered (or will enter) service.
The chart
Every wire on the seabed.
Hover to name a cable, click to open its desk. Dots are landing stations — all 1,921 appear as you zoom in, and clicking one lists everything that comes ashore there. Dashed lines are systems announced but not yet in service.
The ledger
Seven hundred systems, on paper.
The same dataset as a register: search by cable, owner or landing place; sort by length, by service year, or by name. A row opens the cable’s desk on the chart above. A length of “—” means the operator has not published one — the ledger never invents a figure.
The giants
The eight longest systems on the seabed, by their operators’ own stated length.
Coming ashore
Announced systems with a ready-for-service year still ahead — the internet that is being laid right now.
Method
Where this chart comes from.
One dataset, shipped whole
The cables, landing stations and every figure on this page
are TeleGeography’s public Submarine Cable Map
dataset (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0), fetched
2026-08-28 and compiled into a single half-megabyte
pack by tools/mkundersea.py — which ships in
the folder with the raw source files, so the chart can be
rebuilt from scratch. After it loads, this page makes
no network requests: no tiles, no map provider, no
analytics on which part of the world you looked at.
It works with the cable to your own house unplugged.
The coastlines are a Natural Earth extract drawn from the same pack — the chart is an equirectangular projection rendered by this page’s own code, the way ATLAS draws the planet elsewhere on this site.
What a drawn route is — and is not
A cable’s line on this chart is cartographic: the corridor its landings imply, smoothed for a map. The true engineered path — the surveyed route around trenches, anchorages and other cables — is confidential to the operators, and no public chart has it. The lengths are the operators’ own stated figures; 628 of the 701 drawn systems publish one, and the rest show a dash rather than a guess.
The register lists 702 systems; one (Red Hook–Little Saint James) has a detail sheet but no geometry in the public map file, so 701 are drawn, and its private landing at Little Saint James leaves the chart with it — the counts above say so. Dashed lines are systems flagged as not yet in service; their ready-for-service years run to 2029.