If you find this interesting, you'll probably really enjoy this[0] great 1996 Neal Stephenson article, "Mother Earth, Mother Board".

[0] http://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/

Along the same lines, the classic on Singapore is William Gibson's "Disneyland with the Death Penalty" @ http://www.wired.com/1993/04/gibson-2/

To bring that back to the cable area and forward 20 years, Singapore is a US ally and responsible for a lot of data flows in the SEA region. IIRC Optus, one of the major telco's in Australia, is majority-stake owned by Singtel, major shareholder Tamasek Holdings, which I believe is a vehicle basically controlled by the ruling family of Singapore. Seems the US uses one ally against another.

An associate who runs IP for one of the major wireless providers in .au told me a year or two back he was visited by the authorities and told if he accepted Huawei's bid on their infrastructure that their licenses may have trouble getting renewed.

"Free market" "democracy" at work. Politics and cables ... evil shit. Smiles from mainland China.

To be clear, Temasek Holdings is owned by the Singapore government proper, not by any one political family, though the company's CEO is the wife of the prime minister and it's a vehicle through which the government and the ruling party exert a lot of influence over the "private" sector in Singapore.

I had to close that, otherwise I'd be on it all evening ;) I have zero idea why I find the content so interesting!

I am reminded of an ex girlfriend that I had that once asked me why I liked a particular type of food. She demanded to have a reason for what I liked about it. (Let's say it was steak for example). I didn't have an answer for her and we ended up getting into a fight. I said I just liked it and I wasn't interested in defining what I liked about it and being quizzed on it. It just made me feel good to have this particular type of food.

Likewise I never question why I like big heavy machinery or constructions sites. I just do. Something about it is interesting to me.

Can't remember where, but I once read about research that clearly showed that having to explain why you like something (like a piece of art you selected) reduces the amount you like it.

Sigh. BP can afford to run fiber to their oil rigs, but Comcast can't be bothered to lay it through my neighborhood?

Oil rigs make a little more money than residential neighborhoods.

I thought they were currently operating at a loss?

Plus com-cash has exclusive rights to those telephone poles.

Offtopic joking serious: Be careful about mixing oil rigs and residential neighborhoods, because communities like Los Angeles are forced to deal with health problems and contaminated air and drinking water where environmental controls and inspections are weak.

http://la.curbed.com/2014/7/29/10067206/mapping-all-3000-of-...

http://www.latimes.com/science/la-me-next-door-20160221-stor...

I can say with confidence that they don't run fiber to all their platforms, even the ones that are readily accessible.

no NIMBYs on the bottom of the ocean.

The cost to "make good" the sea floor is much cheaper than the cost to "make good" sidewalks, roadways, lobby community groups and pay contractors to pull fibre. Plus the cost to BP is likely worth it for the reliability over VSAT, vs. what might be a marginal improvement to the ARPU for Comcast.

Not all the cables on that map actually exist yet, like the Hawaiki cable.

Un-tick "Future Cables" at bottom of page

I like the MENA line that connects France, through the Suez Canal, and to Mumbai. We have a constant stream of data flowing through underneath the boats sailing above it? Pretty darn cool.

Check http://www.submarinecablemap.com/ for a more complete map

So many cables going right by Cuba yet only the Venezuelan one connects with the island :(

I'm assuming that's going to change shortly (with normalized relations with the US in progress).

That assumes the Cuban government actually wants Cubans to have proper access to the Internet. The Internet isn't bad in Cuba because of some technical limitation.

Does it exist something similar for cables on land?