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.
Notre moniteur montre qu'un paquet Minsk-Îles Cook met en moyenne 507 ms — un voyage à travers Biélorussie, Russie, Autriche, États-Unis, Polynésie française et Rarotonga. Voici ce que la traceroute nous apprend du routage réel d'Internet.
Le 14 avril 2026, le RTT Saipan–Guam a été multiplié par 13 au passage du typhon Cat 5 Sinlaku. Le câble sous-marin Mariana-Guam était intact : un peering BGP local est tombé et le trafic a fait un détour de 12 000 km par Los Angeles. Anatomie RIPE Atlas et BGP.
Maroc Telecom possède un câble sous-marin de 8 600 km reliant Casablanca à quatre pays d'Afrique de l'Ouest. Trace RIPE Atlas réelle : Casablanca-Libreville en 86 ms, 1,025x du plancher physique.
7 atterrissages de câbles sous-marins sur deux côtes, mais les troncs globaux contournent l'Iran. Les traces RIPE Atlas montrent un Iran-Koweït routé via Francfort et Milan : 175 ms pour 250 km.
L'Indonésie compte 143 points d'atterrissement et 72 câbles sous-marins — 42 domestiques, 30 internationaux. Comment le Palapa Ring, le mégahub de Batam et les investissements Big Tech connectent 17 000 îles au monde.
Le Japon possede 70 stations d atterrissage et plus de 50 cables sous-marins. Nos mesures : 18 ms vers la Coree, 106 ms transpacifique, 300+ ms depuis l Europe.
Mesuré depuis quatre sondes RIPE Atlas vers quatre IPs tunisiennes réelles le 12 avril 2026 : RTT médian 70 ms, trois chemins sur quatre passent par l'opérateur italien Sparkle. Pourquoi les six câbles tunisiens passent par un seul — et ce que change Medusa 2026.
Le 11 avril 2026, un paquet de Minsk vers les îles Cook a mis 1969 ms. Huit jours de mesures révèlent une congestion sur le câble Manatua invisible à notre monitoring — car elle vit au-delà du landing point, dans le seul réseau desservant 17 500 habitants de quinze îles.
| 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.