Almost everything you do online crosses the sea floor on a cable about as thick as a garden hose. Here is every one of them in TeleGeography's open map: when each was laid, who owns it, and the narrow straits and busy beaches where dozens of them crowd together.
When you send a message to someone in another continent, it almost certainly does not go through space. Satellites carry a small share of the world's international traffic; the rest travels as light through glass fibres in cables laid along the sea floor, from one beach to another. There are 608 of them in service in TeleGeography's Submarine Cable Map, the best open record of this network, with a combined length of 1,592,824 km: enough to wrap round the Earth 39.7 times, or reach 414% of the way to the Moon.
The record also lists 105 cables that are planned or being laid, with 502,770 km more. For each cable it gives the year it was ready for service, its length, its owners, its suppliers and where it comes ashore: 1,928 landing points in 186 countries and territories. I used it to ask three questions. When was each cable laid? Who is laying them now? And where does the network squeeze through a few narrow places, so that one anchor or one earthquake could cut many cables at once?
Routes, years, owners and landing points: TeleGeography Submarine Cable Map (submarinecablemap.com), CC BY-NC-SA 3.0. Routes are drawn schematically by TeleGeography and are not exact positions on the sea floor. Click a cable, a landing point or a choke point.
Every cable in the record has a ready-for-service year, the year it started carrying traffic. The oldest still in service date from 1989, and 113 cables from the 1990s are still working. Two booms stand out. The first is the dot-com bubble: 74 of today's cables were ready in just three years, 1999 to 2001, with 271,123 km between them, and 2001 is still the year with the most kilometres laid (121,657 km). Then the bubble burst, and only 31 cables came into service from 2002 to 2004.
Cables by the year they were ready for service
608 cables in service by year, coloured by decade, and 105 planned cables by their expected year (coral; 6 have no year yet). Switch to see kilometres. Hover a bar.
The second boom is now. 2023 had the most new cables of any year (32), and the record lists 49 cables for 2027, all of them still planned. Cables have also grown longer: the median cable from the 1990s still in service is 230 km, many of them short hops between neighbours, while the median planned cable is 2,569 km. Cables ready since 2016 make up 46% of all the cable length in service.
One caution about the early years. TeleGeography maps cables that are in service or planned, not the ones that have been retired, so the bars for the 1990s count survivors, not everything that was laid. The first transatlantic fibre-optic cable, TAT-8, came into service in 1988 and has long since been switched off, so it is not here.
For most of their history submarine cables were built by clubs of telephone companies, each taking a share. The record shows this in the owners field: SAT-3/WASC has 33 owners. From 2010 a new kind of owner appears. I matched the four big cloud and content companies, Google, Meta, Amazon (as Amazon Web Services) and Microsoft, by their exact names in each cable's list of owners. None of the cables ready before 2010 lists them. Of cable length ready from 2010 to 2014 they part-own 9%, from 2015 to 2019 24%, from 2020 to 2026 50%, and of the planned length 55%.
Share of cable length part-owned by Google, Meta, Amazon or Microsoft
Kilometres of cable ready in each period with at least one of the four among its owners. Hover for each company's kilometres (a cable can have more than one).
Increasingly they go it alone. Of the 62 cables in the record with one of the four as an owner, 31 have no other owner, 22 of them planned. Google is in 37 cables (23 on its own), Meta in 21, Microsoft in 8 and Amazon in 6. The longest planned cable of all, Project Waterworth at 50,000 km, is Meta's alone. These numbers are a floor: the owners field lists who owns a cable, not who buys capacity on it, and these companies also lease fibre pairs on many cables they do not own.
A network of 608 cables sounds robust, but geography funnels them. Ships, anchors and earthquakes cut cables every year, and when many cables share one strait, one stretch of coast or one landing beach, a single accident can cut several at once. I counted the cables whose routes pass through a band drawn across each well-known strait, and those that reach a few famous landing hubs. The combined length is the total length of the cables that pass, a rough guide to how much of the network is exposed.
Straits and corridors
Cables in service (blue) and planned (coral) whose routes cross a band drawn from shore to shore. Click a row to see it on the map.
The Red Sea is the great funnel between Europe and Asia. 13 cables in service cross the Red Sea at 20° N and 12 pass the Bab el-Mandeb, with a combined length of 217,777 km, 14% of all the cable length in service; 4 more are planned. To reach the Mediterranean, 9 of them cross Egypt overland between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean coasts. In 2024 several Red Sea cables were damaged, reportedly by the dragging anchor of a ship that had been attacked and abandoned, and traffic between Europe, Asia and East Africa had to be rerouted. The Strait of Sicily (18 cables) is the Mediterranean's waist, and in East Asia the Luzon Strait between Taiwan and the Philippines carries 10: in 2006 an earthquake off southern Taiwan broke several cables there at once.
Landing hubs
Cables in service and planned whose routes reach each area. Click a row to see it on the map.
Then there are the hubs, where cables crowd onto a few beaches. Singapore is in a class of its own: 38 cables in service reach the sea within 35 km of it, with 14 more planned. The Boso peninsula south of Tokyo has 20, Guam 15, the Fujairah coast of the United Arab Emirates 15, Cornwall 14, Marseille 12 and Hawaii 10, with 6 planned. Guam and Hawaii are the stepping stones of the Pacific; Marseille is where cables from Asia come ashore in Europe.
The data can also find its own choke points. On a grid of half-degree cells (about 55 km), the busiest cell in the world lies off Sakra Island, Singapore, crossed by 38 cables, followed by the waters off Chikura, Japan (18) and Fujairah, United Arab Emirates (15). Turn on the cable density layer on the map to see them all.
Counting only cables that link a country to another country, the United States has the most (59), then the United Kingdom (51) and Singapore (34). 30 countries and territories have ten or more.
The most connected countries
International cables in service that land in each country or territory, with planned ones in coral. Click a row to see the country's cables.
At the other end, 29 countries and territories have just one international cable. For places with land borders, such as Poland or Romania, that matters less: they reach the world through land cables too. But 17 of them are islands with no land border, where one cut can leave a whole territory with little more than satellite links. They are mostly small Pacific, Atlantic and Caribbean islands, plus Greenland. Tuvalu appears only on a planned cable.
Tonga showed what that means. In January 2022 the eruption of the Hunga Tonga volcano cut the Tonga Cable to Fiji, which was then the country's only international cable, and the islands were largely cut off for weeks. In TeleGeography's record today Tonga also lands on a second system, Hawaiki. The record dates each cable by its first ready-for-service year (2018 for Hawaiki), so branches added later carry the older date.
Landing stations tell the same story at a smaller scale. 1,312 of the 1,792 landing points in service (73%) have just one cable. The busiest single stations are Batam, Indonesia and Tuas, Singapore (14 cables each), then Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (13).
12 cables squeeze through the Bab el-Mandeb. 17 islands hang on a single cable.
Data. TeleGeography's Submarine Cable Map publishes its data through an open API: a route file, a landing point file and a page for each cable. I used all 713 cables in the 2026 version. A cable is in service unless TeleGeography marks it as planned; the year is its ready-for-service year, which for planned cables is the expected year. Length is TeleGeography's stated length; for the 73 cables without one I measured the drawn route along the Earth's surface (for cables with both, the drawn route is about 94% of the stated length).
Hyperscalers. A cable counts if Google, Meta, Amazon Web Services or Microsoft appears as a whole name in its comma-separated list of owners. I checked for other spellings (Facebook, Alphabet, AWS, Amazon) and found none; Metacore Subcom, a different company, is not counted. Shares are of kilometres ready in each period.
Choke points. For each strait I drew a band from shore to shore and counted the cables whose drawn routes cross it; for Egypt, cables that run over Egyptian land or land on both its Mediterranean and Red Sea coasts. For hubs I counted the cables whose routes reach an area (a circle round a city, or an island group). The grid counts the distinct cables crossing each half-degree cell. Routes are schematic, so counts near a boundary can be off by one or two.
Countries. A cable is international if its landing points are in more than one of TeleGeography's countries and territories. Islands are places whose Natural Earth outline touches no other country (French overseas departments set by hand). Hong Kong is listed under China in the source.
What this cannot say. The record has no capacities, so a 1990s cable and a new one count the same, although the new one may carry thousands of times more. It omits retired cables, and it does not show the land cables that also join countries. Ownership is as TeleGeography lists it. Nothing here is a statement about the security of any particular cable.