Smart Cable Routing
Dijkstra-based routing through real submarine cables and landing points from TeleGeography data. Accurate distance multipliers for land and undersea segments.
In-depth analysis of how internet traffic moves through 703 submarine cable systems, based on real RIPE Atlas measurements from 5 probes worldwide.
The submarine cable network remains stable with 1498 latency checks conducted over the past 24 hours showing no anomalies and zero active alerts. This indicates that all monitored cables are functioning normally.
On May 31, 2026, a M5.6 earthquake occurred 137 km southeast of Oistins, Barbados. The submarine cables with landing points within 350km of the event, including Southern Caribbean Fiber and ECFS, are currently operating without any impact as indicated by our latency measurements.
The network remained in a clean and stable state today with no anomalies or active alerts detected across the 440 of 703 catalogued submarine cables monitored through 2705 latency/route checks. This marks another day of smooth operation for GeoCables, reflecting the robustness and reliability of our submarine cable infrastructure.
Notable fluctuations in signal times were observed on several cables: Havhingsten/CeltixConnect-2 (CC-2) saw a significant improvement with a 45% reduction in latency to 34.2ms from its 7-day average, while Bulikula and SeaMeWe-6 also showed improvements of 11% and 15%, respectively. Conversely, Sweden-Estonia (EE-S 1) experienced an increase of 62%, reaching 65.5ms today compared to its 7d-avg of 40.4ms, and FALCON saw a minor increase of 8%. These changes are within normal operational jitter and do not indicate any significant issues.
The event in Indonesia affected the operation of submarine cables, leading to increased delays. Our analytics provides detailed information on the current status.
M6.0 Earthquake near Antigua & Barbuda — Submarine Cable Monitoring Report
Japan M6.7 Earthquake — Submarine Cable Status Report May 15, 2026 · GeoCables Report · Region: Japan, Pacific Coast
From April 17 to May 7, 2026, our monitors watched Tannat's Argentina-to-Brazil latency drift from 25ms to 506ms — twenty times the physics floor. Twelve alerts, neighbouring cables clean. What an opaque submarine-cable rerouting looks like in three weeks of data.
GeoCables flagged 82 latency anomalies on 49 submarine cables in 53 days. 16 crossed our high-severity threshold. Every event, mapped.
Tbilisi-to-Aden round-trip is 790 ms — and the path goes through Frankfurt to Starlink to Yemen. With Red Sea cables down due to conflict, satellite is now the working route.
Almaty to Tokyo round-trip is 877 ms — 16 times the great-circle minimum. Traceroute reveals the route: Kazakhstan to London to Singapore to Japan, 21,000 km of fibre to reach a city 5,400 km away.
| Point A | — |
|---|---|
| Point B | — |
| Coordinates A | — |
| Coordinates B | — |
| Cable Multiplier | — |
| Crosses Ocean | — |
| Route Details | — |
| Data Source | — |
Dijkstra-based routing through real submarine cables and landing points from TeleGeography data. Accurate distance multipliers for land and undersea segments.
Interactive map showing every cable your data touches — backbone nodes, landing stations, and submarine segments with real geographic coordinates.
Launch real network measurements from probes worldwide. Compare theoretical estimates with actual RTT and hop-by-hop packet journeys with ISP geolocation.
Speed-of-light physics combined with cable distance to estimate latency. See the real-world overhead — how much slower actual routing is vs fiber limits.
Enter cities, IP addresses, or domain names — everything is resolved to coordinates with hosting location identification and optimal cable route.
Traceroute hops enriched with city, country, ISP. Phases auto-detected: local → ISP → CDN → backbone → submarine cable. Visual RTT timelines.
City names, IP addresses, or domains. The system resolves coordinates, identifies countries, and determines whether the route crosses oceans.
A graph algorithm finds the optimal route through landing points and submarine cables with accurate distance multipliers for each segment type.
One click launches RIPE Atlas probes for real ping and traceroute. See actual RTT, identify every router, and find where your packet enters submarine cables.
Validate routing assumptions, estimate latency budgets, troubleshoot unexpected paths.
Understand your ping. Compare the physical speed limit vs reality for any server.
Choose optimal PoP locations based on submarine cable topology and landing proximity.
Teach how the physical internet works. Visualize the gap between light speed and real routing.
Over 500 submarine cable systems span the world's oceans, with a combined length of approximately 1.4 million kilometers — enough to circle the Earth 35 times.
Submarine cables carry over 99% of intercontinental data traffic. Despite what many people think, satellites handle only a tiny fraction of global internet traffic.
Light travels through fiber optic cable at about two-thirds the speed of light in vacuum. A signal from London to New York takes approximately 28 milliseconds one way.
Modern submarine cables are designed to last 25 years. Cables are buried in the seabed near shores and laid directly on the ocean floor in deep water, protected by layers of steel and polyethylene.
The deepest submarine cables reach the abyssal plains at nearly 8,000 meters. At these depths, cables rest on the ocean floor under enormous pressure, beyond the reach of anchors and fishing gear.
Major transoceanic cable projects like 2Africa or PEACE cost over $1 billion. Investment comes from tech giants like Google, Meta, and Microsoft, as well as telecom consortiums.
GeoCables is a research publication on the physical infrastructure of the global internet. We publish in-depth analyses of how data actually travels between countries — which submarine cables are used, what the measured latency is, and why it differs from the theoretical minimum.
Our research is grounded in real RIPE Atlas measurements collected from five probes we operate in Minsk, Almaty, Tbilisi, Jerusalem, and Sevastopol. We trace specific routes across 703 submarine cable systems and 1,900+ landing points cataloged by TeleGeography, then publish what we find.
Light through fiber travels at ~200,000 km/s — about two-thirds the speed of light in vacuum. That sets the theoretical floor for round-trip time. In practice, real RTT is 1.5–4× higher due to routing detours, optical amplifiers, protocol processing, peering between networks, and suboptimal path selection. Our research articles document this overhead on specific routes — measuring it, explaining it, and tracing it back to the cables and networks responsible.