Submarine Cable Map
This year’s TeleGeography map of the undersea network looks beautiful—inspired by old maps. I love the way that latency between countries is shown as inset constellations.
Extremely offline: what happened when a Pacific island was cut off from the internet | Tonga | The Guardian
A fascinating look at the importance of undersea cables, taken from a new book called The Web Beneath the Waves.
Related links
The invisible seafaring industry that keeps the internet afloat
A fascinating in-depth look at the maintenance of undersea cables:
The industry responsible for this crucial work traces its origins back far beyond the internet, past even the telephone, to the early days of telegraphy. It’s invisible, underappreciated, analog.
It’s a truism that people don’t think about infrastructure until it breaks, but they tend not to think about the fixing of it, either.
The People’s Cloud
A documentary by Matt Parker (brother of Andy) that follows in the footsteps of people like Andrew Blum, James Bridle, and Ingrid Burrington, going in search of the physical locations of the internet, and talking to the people who maintain it. Steven Pemberton makes an appearance in the first and last of five episodes:
- What is the Cloud vs What Existed Before?
- Working out the Internet: it’s a volume game
- The Submarine Cable Network
- How Much Data Is There?
- Convergence
The music makes it feel quite sinister.
The proto-internet | Intelligent Life magazine
Mapping the submarine cables of the Victorian internet.
And by the way, why did nobody tell me about Cartophilia before now? I’m very disappointed in you.