Untangling the world-wide mesh of undersea cables

Abstract

The growth of global Internet traffic has driven an exponential expansion of the submarine cable network, both in terms of the sheer number of links and its total capacity. Today, a complex mesh of hundreds of cables, stretching over 1 million kilometers, connects nearly every corner of the earth and is instrumental in closing the remaining connectivity gaps. Despite the scale and critical role of the submarine network for both business and society at large, our community has mostly ignored it, treating it as a black box in most Internet studies, from connectivity to inter-domain traffic and reliability. We make the case for a new research agenda focused on characterizing the global submarine network and the critical role it plays as a basic component of any inter-continental end-to-end connection.