Internet and sub-sea cable routes interest me. I’ve recently found a couple of good visual tools to support some of my investigations and thought you might want to have a look. (Exploring is fun!).
Some of the interest is pure curiosity, and some are work driven. So I have these in my bag of tools that I use.
I use the map provided by the Submarine Cable Map. This covers the 293 subsea cable systems, and the maps show the landing points for the cables; cable length (which drives latency); and the ready for service date (as some of the cables are still being laid and commissioned).
If you want to see this in a more pictorial version, see Submarine Cable Map 2017. One of the insights is that the fastest growing users of these cables are no longer the Internet backbone providers. Instead, the content providers (e.g. Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft) are now growing capacity between their data centers to support the cloud)
For the Internet, there is an Internet Exchange Map, which provides a list of Internet Exchanges and their PoPs. As the Internet changes so frequently, any map is almost out of date as soon as produced. (So TeleGeography’s Global Internet Map of 2012 is the latest.)
Attempts at providing alternatives don’t necessarily relate to geographies and produce some surreal results. So maybe moving to BGP based tools such as Looking Glass and the Peering DB would be helpful at this point.
There are many projects on-going to automate and produce more intuitive (and automated) maps of the Internet, and CAIDA leads this effort. You can download datasets older than two years but restrictions are placed on more recent files. (Imagine giving a hacker a map of the key targets on the Internet, and not having to have them work it out themselves).
