GRID · SUBMARINE CABLES
The Internet’s Undersea Backbone
The land grid moves energy across continents. Submarine cables move the world’s data across oceans — and they are the literal plumbing that connects the data centres. This maps the whole network: 714 submarine communications cables and their 1,914 landing points, roughly 1,814,904km of cable in all — enough to circle the Earth about 45times. They’re drawn as glowing charge-blue lines over the sea, with radar-green dots where a cable comes ashore; tap a line for its name and length. Almost all of the traffic between continents — the web, video, finance, the cloud — travels these strands on the seafloor, not satellites.
The longest cables
The giants of the network span tens of thousands of kilometres, stringing together whole continents. 2Africa wraps the entire African continent; Project Waterworth is a new Meta-led system reaching five continents; the SeaMeWefamily links Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Western Europe. Lengths are great-circle sums computed from each cable’s route.
Where cables come ashore
A cable is only useful where it surfaces. Landing points cluster on the coasts that route the world’s traffic — the US and Canadian seaboards, the UK as Europe’s gateway, and the dense archipelago crossroads of Indonesia, the Philippines and Japan. Unlike the land-grid layers, which follow where OpenStreetMap is best mapped, this landing data is genuinely global — cables reach 186 countries and territories.
About this data
Every cable and landing point comes from the TeleGeography Submarine Cable Map — the same source the live Earth cables view renders. Here it’s baked to a dated snapshot and framed around the infrastructure, because cables change over months. Each cable’s lengthis a great-circle sum computed from its mapped route — a real figure used for the ranking above and the map popups, but notto set line thickness: capacity isn’t in the data and a short cable can carry enormous traffic, so length must not stand in for importance. Every cable is therefore drawn at the same weight, the colour carrying the story. Two “to-be-determined” landing points (planned cables whose shore landing isn’t fixed yet) are left out. Snapshot taken 2026-06-25; each map popup links out to the cable’s page on submarinecablemap.com.