Submitted by idleberg, smileandburn and others. Idleberg says:

Something I came across by accident, the “Internet Tube”, a map of the world’s network of submarine fibre-optic cables. Looks terrible to me, especially since one of the main point of interest, the geographical context, is barely noticeable.

Transit Maps says:

While I feel that the goal of this diagram – the simplification of a vast and complex nodal network down to its basic elements – is a laudable one, the execution leaves a lot to be desired for me. If anything, it’s too simple, leaving out detail that enables you to see how the network of cables actually works.

It seems that the network has been broken down into imaginary  “route lines” with appropriate (if fanciful) names, rather than showing actual undersea cables. While this helps to group countries together thematically, it also could give viewers the idea (for example) that there’s one single cable that runs from the U.S. to Russia to Japan via the Arctic Ocean. There isn’t (yet), and Russia’s submarine cable connections are actually far more complex than could ever be shown on a diagram like this, relying more on cables under the Baltic and Black Seas than any “super cable” that’s implied here.

My other main issue with the diagram is the use of three-letter ISO country codes instead of actual country names. This makes the diagram unnecessarily obtuse – which country is represented by VCT? Or FSM or MNE? If H.C. Beck could fit “High Street Kensington” onto his original tube map, then a clone of his map should really be able to work with actual country names. Perhaps those names could then be supplemented with each country’s top level internet domain code (.au, .uk, etc), which makes far more sense for a map about the Internet than three-letter ISO codes.

Design-wise, it’s Yet Another Tube Map Clone (YATMC), right down to the route line colours and blue type for “station” labels. Yawn.

If you want a submarine cable network map that actually gives you some idea of how it all fits together and how staggeringly, mind-bendingly complex it all really is, then I highly recommend Greg’s Cable Map. Check it out and then realise how amazing it is that you can send an email to the other side of the world in milliseconds without any effort at all on your behalf.

Our rating: Tries hard to simplify an incredibly complex network, but through thematic and design choices, creates something that doesn’t really tell us much apart from the fact that there are cables under the sea and that some countries censor the Internet. One-and-a-half stars.

Note: For the record, VCT is St. Vincent and the Grenadines, FSM is the Federated States of Micronesia, and MNE is Montenegro.

Source: Information Geographics at the Oxford Internet Institute