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Common questions about submarine cables, network resilience, and how to use this platform.
There are over 600 active submarine cables in service worldwide, spanning more than 1.4 million kilometers of ocean floor. These cables carry over 99% of intercontinental internet traffic. The Submarine Cable Map database tracks 691 cables connecting 186 countries and territories across all inhabited continents.
When a submarine cable is cut — due to anchor strikes, natural disasters, or equipment failure — internet traffic is automatically rerouted through remaining cables if redundancy exists. Countries with fewer cable connections can experience significant connectivity loss or increased latency. The impact depends on how many alternative paths are available and how concentrated the country's connections are in a single cable.
A landing point is the coastal location where a submarine cable comes ashore and connects to the terrestrial telecommunications network. Each cable has at least two landing points — one at each end — though many cables have additional intermediate landing points along their route. Landing points are critical infrastructure nodes; damage to a single landing point can disconnect an entire country.
Countries connect through landing points on their coastlines. The number and diversity of cable connections determines a country's connectivity and resilience. Landlocked countries rely on terrestrial fiber links to neighboring coastal countries that have submarine cable landing points. A country with only one or two cables is far more vulnerable to outages than one with a dozen diverse paths.
Betweenness centrality measures how often a cable lies on the shortest path between pairs of countries. Cables with high betweenness centrality are critical transit links — their failure would disrupt the most communication routes even if they don't directly connect the affected countries. This metric helps identify the most strategically important cables in the global network.
Network resilience is measured through several complementary metrics: the number of diverse cable paths available (redundancy), N-1 and N-2 survival analysis showing what happens when 1 or 2 cables fail simultaneously, the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) of cable concentration, and the percentage of countries still reachable after failures. Together these metrics provide a comprehensive picture of a country's or region's vulnerability to cable outages.
Branching units (BUs) are underwater junction boxes that split a submarine cable into multiple branches, allowing it to serve more than two landing points. Domestic branching units (DBUs) connect a country's landing point to a passing cable without requiring the cable to terminate there. The segment topology — the complete graph of landing points, branching units, and cable segments between them — determines the actual physical paths that data can travel.
Yes. Select any country on the Countries page, then choose a second country to analyze their submarine cable connectivity. The platform shows all cable segments forming the physical path between them, with hop-by-hop visualization on the map. You can also simulate cable cuts to see how removing specific cables affects connectivity.
Yes. On the Regions page you can draw a custom area on the map using freehand (Shift+drag) or polygon (Shift+click) mode. The platform automatically identifies landing points within the drawn area and provides connectivity metrics, failure impact simulation, internal cable structure analysis, and benchmarking against peer regions.
Learn how to use the Submarine Cable Map to understand what happens when a specific cable fails.
Navigate to the Cables page to see all 691 submarine cables organized by continent.
Click on any cable to open its detail page with route map, landing points, and analysis tabs.
The Failure Impact tab shows which countries lose connectivity, how many communication pairs are affected, and the remaining redundancy level.
Switch to the Advanced Metrics tab for betweenness centrality, bridge index, and minimum cut sets that reveal the cable's strategic importance in the global network.
Step-by-step guide to analyzing the submarine cable path between any two countries.
Navigate to the Countries page to see all 186 connected countries and territories.
Click on a country to view its infrastructure details, resilience scores, and cable connections.
Select another country from the list to initiate a pair analysis between the two.
The platform displays all cable segments forming the physical path between the two countries, visualized hop by hop on the map.
Use cutoff modes to remove specific cables and observe how the path changes or breaks, revealing critical transit dependencies.
Draw a custom area on the map and analyze the submarine cable infrastructure within it.
Navigate to the Regions page with predefined regions and the option to draw custom ones.
Hold Shift and drag on the map for a freehand region, or Shift+click to place polygon vertices.
The platform automatically identifies all submarine cable landing points within your drawn area.
View connectivity metrics, failure impact simulations, internal cable structure, and a benchmark comparison against peer regions.