Check and Mate. Always shown on a flat map, never going south connecting S America to Africa to Australia.

The secret world of cable landing sites

Connecting to the US is critical for any serious international communications company, and Tata’s Global Network (TGN) is the only wholly owned fibre ring encircling the planet. It amounts to a 700,000km subsea and terrestrial network with more than 400 points of presence worldwide.

Tata is willing to share, though; it’s not just there so the CEO’s kids get the best latency when playing Call of Duty, and the better half can stream Game of Thrones without a hitch. At any one time Tata’s Tier 1 network is handling 24 percent of the world’s Internet traffic, so the chance to get up close and personal with TGN-A (Atlantic), TGN-WER (Western Europe), and their cable consortium friends is not to be missed.

The site itself is a pretty much vanilla data centre from the outside, appearing grey and anonymous—they could be crating cabbages in there for all you’d know. Inside, it’s RFID cards to move around the building and fingerprint readers to access the data centre areas, but first a cuppa and a chat in the boardroom. This isn’t your typical data centre, and some aspects need explaining. In particular, submarine cable systems have extraordinary power requirements, all supported by extensive backup facilities.

Tagged: flat earth