Mapping the Internet

This caught my eye today and it’s something that I find very interesting. How many of us actually know what the internet is and what it looks like?

If you ask the average person on the street, I doubt they would realise that internet is kept alive and breathing through a vast series of underground fibre optic cables.

Nicolas Rapp, Graphics Director for Fortune Magazine, teamed up with Dave Drazen from GeoTel LLC to produce this graphical representation of the information flows. The map shows us where those fibre optics are and how they’re clustered, particularly around countries with high internet usage.

The fibre optic cables transmit light over massive distances, acting as conduits of information across the globe. Power repeaters keep the signals moving and the information travels around the world in a matter of milliseconds. These are the veins and arteries of the beast that is… the internet. And believe it or not, you can kill it, as an elderly woman in Georgia once found out to her detriment.

Click for the full graphic below and you can read his original post here.