About the project
Mapping the ocean floor,
one cable at a time.
GeoCables is an independent platform dedicated to visualizing and monitoring the submarine cable infrastructure that carries over 95% of the world's internet traffic.
The path of one measurement
Every event on this site starts with a single traceroute. Click a station to see what happens there and where you can watch it live.
Our measurement points around the world keep sending traceroutes to addresses in many countries. A trace records every node on the path and how long it took to answer.
See it live: live map →Each node on the path gets a country, a city and a network. That turns a list of addresses into a line on the map.
See it live: transit map →From the countries the path crossed we work out which submarine cable carries it. A path from Singapore to Marseille cannot avoid the ocean floor.
See it live: cable map →Every pair of measurement point and cable has a usual delay: the average of the last twenty measurements. Each new measurement is compared with it in two ways at once, by ping and by trace.
See it live: cable monitoring →If the delay doubles in both measurements, we re-check, and only after two confirmations out of three do we open an alert. A single spike does not become an alert.
See it live: cable incidents →An alert is not yet a fault. We check whether other points see the slowdown and whether the route changed, and label it honestly: a widespread event, a route change or a false positive.
See it live: events feed →What is GeoCables?
GeoCables is a comprehensive submarine cable mapping and network route analysis platform. It combines an authoritative cable inventory with real-time network measurements from our own probe network worldwide.
The platform serves as both a public reference for submarine cable information and a sophisticated monitoring tool that tracks the health and performance of global submarine cable infrastructure - detecting anomalies, measuring latency, and visualizing how internet traffic actually routes across the globe.
About the project
GeoCables is an independent research project built by network engineers and infrastructure enthusiasts. The platform was created to bridge the gap between static cable maps and live network performance data - combining authoritative geodata with real measurements from our own distributed network.
"When a submarine cable has an incident, how does traffic actually reroute - and can we see it in real time? GeoCables was built to answer exactly that question."
The monitoring infrastructure spans our own measurement nodes across underrepresented regions of the global internet - strategically placed to capture network paths that public datasets often miss.
Technology
GeoCables integrates multiple data sources and technologies to deliver accurate, real-time insights:
Data sources
Cable route and specification data is sourced from TeleGeography's Submarine Cable Map, the industry standard reference for submarine cable infrastructure. Network measurement data is collected through our own distributed probe network.
All measurement data is collected, processed, and stored independently. GeoCables is not affiliated with TeleGeography or RIPE NCC.
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