Wet Plant

Almost everything you do online leaves your country through a cable lying on the seafloor. Wet Plant is a map of those cables. 606 cables in service and 97 more still planned, drawn on a globe you can spin, with their real routes, the countries they land in, who owns them, how long they are and when they entered service. 1,922 landing points across 186 countries. 1.55 million kilometres of cable. WHAT "WET PLANT" MEANS It is the industry's own term for everything in a submarine cable system that sits underwater, from the beach manhole at one end to the beach manhole at the other. The part on land is the dry plant. The name is insider jargon, which is exactly why it is on the front of the app. A LIVE SIGNAL, HONESTLY LABELLED Georgia Tech's IODA project measures country-level internet reachability. Wet Plant joins that signal to the countries each cable lands in, so you can see where the network is currently having a bad day. What it does not do is claim more than it knows. Nobody publishes live per-cable faults, so a disrupted landing is not proof of a cut. It means connectivity in a country that cable reaches is degraded, which could equally be a power cut, a storm or a government shutdown. The app says that, in the app. And when the disruption feed cannot be reached, the figure reads as unavailable rather than zero. A zero nobody measured is an all clear that was never earned. NOTHING HERE IS INVENTED An earlier version showed per-cable packet loss and throughput. Both were removed, because no public source publishes them and the totals they produced were roughly fifteen times TeleGeography's own figure for all international bandwidth on Earth. A labelled fabrication that wrong is worse than no number. Every panel marks its own provenance. Measured values come from TeleGeography and IODA. Round-trip time is modelled, calculated from each cable's real published length at the speed of light in silica fibre, and is labelled as calculated rather than observed. The positions of the sun, moon and planets, and the day and night line across the globe, are computed from your device's clock. NO ACCOUNT, NO ADS, NO TRACKING There is no sign-in, no analytics, no advertising and no tracking of any kind. One setting is stored on your device. One request goes out, to fetch the disruption feed. That is the whole of it. The app is free and complete. There is an optional tip that unlocks nothing. DATA Cable routes, owners, lengths, service dates and landing points come from TeleGeography, used under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0. Disruption signal from Georgia Tech IODA. Coastlines from Natural Earth. Every source is listed in the app with its licence.