<img attachment="seacablehi.jpeg" align="left" class="frame">Here's a great diagram of the <a href="http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-images/Technology/Pix/pictures/2008/02/01/SeaCableHi.jpg" source="The Guardian">Fibre-optic Submarine Cable Systems</a> encircling the globe. In addition to an map of the cable systems throughout the world, it provides some statistics about the recent shipping accident that severed four of those cable lines, killing the internet and business traffic for almost 80 million users. The government of Egypt was exhorting its citizens to lay off downloading movies and songs for a day or two so that "more important" business could use the bandwidth. If you can't access the main image, there's a local copy cached here as well (click the image above instead of the link)<fn>. Interestingly, notes accompanying the diagram state that the total available capacity is 7.1TB, of which 5.7TB has been purchased. However, on the trans-Atlantic cable, though 80% of the capacity has been purchased, amazingly only 29% is utilized. Of the utilized capacity, only 1% of that is now accounted for by telephone traffic. It's difficult to discern to what, exactly, the 7.1TB refers, because in another paragraph, it's mentioned that the trans-Atlantic capacity alone is <iq>over 7 trillion bps</iq>. Is the latter figure actually saying that the trans-Atlantic capacity is truly 7Tb (where the little "b" stands for bits), leading us to believe that US/European traffic only has 1/8 of the available bandwidth on the planet? Or is there a typo, in which bits and bytes are being used interchangeably? At any rate, it seems that there's plenty of room for growth. <hr> <ft>It's just a shame that the image is stored in JPG format, which is singularly bad for a graphic with so much small text on it. PNG would have been a much more efficient and crisp way to go.</ft>