This Is the Internet

Gizmodo-

The Internet isn't only on your screen. Or behind your couch. Or in Google's data centers. It's also underwater, where fiber-optic cables stretch across oceans and loop around continents.

Satellites are like dial-up. Nobody uses them.Undersea cables make the Internet global, with the most sophisticated of them capable of transmitting nearly ten terabits of data per second, compressed through just a handful of fiber-optic strands. There are only hundreds of these cables in waters around the world. And they are all preposterously proportioned, as thin as a garden hose and as long as-actually, nothing. No human construction matches them. They are the longest tubes ever made, and, for the first time ever, there's a truly accurate interactive online map of them.