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 700 submarine cable systems, based on real RIPE Atlas measurements from 5 probes worldwide.
Maroc Telecom owns a 8,600 km submarine cable connecting Casablanca to four West African countries. Real RIPE Atlas trace: Casablanca to Libreville in 86 ms, 1.025x of physics floor.
7 submarine cable landings on two coasts, but global trunks bypass Iran. RIPE Atlas traces show Iran-Kuwait routing through Frankfurt and Milan: 175 ms for 250 km.
Indonesia has 143 submarine cable landing points and 72 cables — 42 domestic, 30 international. How the Palapa Ring, the Batam megahub, and Big Tech investments connect 17,000 islands to the world.
Japan has 70 submarine cable landing stations and 50+ cables — more than any country. Our monitoring data: 18 ms to Korea, 106 ms transpacific, 300+ ms from Europe. Six alerts in 30 days, all self-resolving.
Measured from four Geocables probes to four real Tunisian IPs on 12 April 2026: median RTT 70 ms, three of four paths run through Italian carrier Sparkle. Why Tunisia's six submarine cables are reached through one — and what Medusa 2026 changes.
On April 11, 2026, a packet from Minsk to the Cook Islands took 1969 ms. Eight days of measurements show a congestion pattern on the Manatua cable that our monitor never flagged — because it lives past the landing point, inside the only network serving 17,500 people on fifteen islands.
Red Sea submarine cable damage forces internet traffic on 15,000 km detours. Our traceroute measurements show Oman-Australia packets traveling 368ms via Marseille instead of 60ms direct. Real latency data from GeoCables monitoring.
Cuba sits 150 km from Florida but its internet takes a 10,000 km detour through Venezuela. We monitor Cuba's only civilian submarine cable ALBA-1 every 12 hours — real latency data, route analysis, and the geopolitics of Caribbean connectivity.
| 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 700 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.