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.
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.
North Korea's entire international internet is 1,024 IPs in 4 /24 blocks on one ASN (Star JV). On 23 April 2026 we fired 60 pings from 15 global probes at KP targets. Zero answered. Yet kcna.kp returns HTTP 200 in 540ms. ICMP is walled off at a Hong Kong node inside China Unicom.
Five countries touch the Caspian. Zero submarine cables sit on its floor. On 23 April 2026 we ran nine traceroutes between Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan. Every single packet went through Russia. The Trans-Caspian Fiber Optic Cable changes this in Q3 2026.
Turkmenistan, a country of 6 million with four land neighbors, connects to the global internet through exactly three router IP addresses in three foreign operators. We ran 31 traceroutes on 21 April 2026. Iran reaches its neighbor via Istanbul — or Frankfurt. There is no third door.
Gibraltar sits at one of the world's busiest maritime chokepoints — about 300 ships a day cross the strait. Yet only one submarine cable — the 15,000 km Europe India Gateway — actually lands on the Rock. Seven others cross the same strait without stopping. Why a chokepoint isn't always a hub.
| 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.