TeleGeography releases Vintage-style Maps and Charts to reflect the current state of the submarine cables that carry the world's internet traffic.
The latest edition depicts 299 cable systems that are currently active, under construction, or expected to be fully-funded by the end of 2015.
This year’s map pays tribute to the pioneering mapmakers of the Age of Discovery, incorporating elements of medieval and renaissance cartography. In addition to serving as navigational aids, maps from this era were highly sought-after works of art, often adorned with fanciful illustrations of real and imagined dangers at sea. Such embellishments largely disappeared in the early 1600s, pushing modern map design into a purely functional direction.
The Interactive Map also contains inserts for latency, lift capacity, and dangers to cables.
(Score: 2) by TLA on Tuesday March 17 2015, @11:51PM
...and here be a three thousand mile long sea snake.
I had an antique globe (1930?) with such fanciful claims of sea monsters and some totally unrecognisable coastlines (including a land bridge marker between South America and Antarctica!).
Excuse me, I think I need to reboot my horse. - NCommander
(Score: 3, Informative) by richtopia on Wednesday March 18 2015, @01:01AM
This is a very cool map, and I was ready to buy a copy for my wall, but not at 250 dollars. I cannot even find a high res version that you can read the small details of for archival purposes.
(Score: 1) by Tedderouni on Wednesday March 18 2015, @04:00AM
This. I would totally buy one of these if it was a reasonable price. This should be something close to $40 for a nice poster-size print. And the images on the website are useless - the interactive version lets you zoom in at high detail, but all the normal static image formats they provide are unreadable. This is a missed opportunity.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 18 2015, @01:07PM
Should be pretty easy to pull all the images at the highest res from the interactive map and stitch them together, no?
(Score: 1) by warcques on Wednesday March 18 2015, @01:54AM
And yet, they don't highlight the trunks the US NSA keeps verbatim branches of.... perhaps that means it is all of them ?
(Score: 1) by anubi on Wednesday March 18 2015, @03:03AM
Anyone note how concentrated the lines were into certain cities... like Mumbai, Chennai, Hong Kong/Guangzhou ?
Kinda scary when you see so much critical infrastructure placed so close... almost as if it were designed to be easily interruptible.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 18 2015, @01:10PM
Never attribute to malevolence that which can easily be explained away with incompetence
(Score: 3, Insightful) by pixeldyne on Wednesday March 18 2015, @10:04PM
call me ignorant but I was surprised that the cables are not laid by submarines, they are actually far too big to be laid or towed by any submarine .