How Does the Internet Travel?

The submarine cables between two countries, and why that is not the same as a route.

Known submarine cable connections. This page shows the cable systems that physically land in both countries. It is not the route your packets take. Real internet routing is decided by BGP, your ISP, peering agreements, transit providers and current network conditions, and it changes from minute to minute.

How a request actually travels

  1. Your device sends the request to your internet provider over fibre, cable or radio.
  2. Your provider's network carries it to an internet exchange or to a transit provider it buys capacity from.
  3. The request is handed between networks. Each one decides where to send it next using BGP routes it has learned, weighted by contracts as much as by distance.
  4. If the destination is on another continent, one of those networks puts the traffic onto a submarine cable, often one it neither owns nor operates, but has bought capacity on.
  5. The cable carries it ashore at a landing station, where it rejoins terrestrial fibre and continues to the destination network.
  6. The reply comes back, and not necessarily by the same path.

Why we will not draw you a route

A map that drew a single line from your country to another and called it "your route" would be making it up. The path depends on which providers are involved, what they have agreed with one another, and what is congested or broken at that moment. None of that is in a map of cables.

What a cable map can honestly tell you is which physical links exist, and that is what this page shows. If you want to see the actual hops your own traffic takes, a traceroute from your own machine is the right tool.

Data source

Cable routes, names, operators and landing stations come from OpenStreetMap, licensed under the ODbL. Cable lengths, ready-for-service years, owners and official websites come from Wikidata (CC0). Landing point cities and countries were resolved with Nominatim, and the country outlines on the globe are Natural Earth (public domain).

Nothing on these pages is estimated, generated or filled in. Where a source does not state a value, the page says Data unavailable.

Data last updated

This dataset is rebuilt periodically from the sources above. It is not live, and it does not report cable faults or outages.

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