2026-04-05

Cable Cut

The invisible internet is under attack. We're watching.

Consumer-facing submarine cable security intelligence — incident tracking, repair fleet capacity dashboards, chokepoint risk analysis, "shadow vessel" monitoring near cable routes, and geopolitical threat maps. Translating scattered B2B telecom data and government advisories into a beautiful, opinionated, weekly data-journalism site that answers: *How safe is the internet beneath your feet?*

Niche Explored

Consumer-facing submarine cable security & resilience intelligence — tracking the invisible infrastructure carrying 95% of the world’s data traffic.

Why This Niche NOW

7+ cable cuts in Baltic Sea between Nov 2024 and Jan 2025, suspected Russian sabotage (confirmed by Swedish investigation)
Red Sea cable incident Sep 7, 2025 — severed multiple cables, killed 25% Asia-Europe traffic capacity, affected India, South Asia, Africa, Middle East
Taiwan straits risk — cables connecting Taiwan identified as critical vulnerability for global chip supply chain communications
Foreign Affairs cover story (Jan 2, 2026): “The New Arteries of Power: Subsea Cables Are This Century’s Hidden Battleground”
CSIS report (Mar 5, 2026): “Risk Beneath the Waves: Safeguarding Subsea Cables for a Secure Global Network”
DHS white paper (Dec 2024): “Priorities for DHS Engagement on Subsea Cable Security & Resilience”
177+ upvotes on Hacker News for a single Guardian article on cable sabotage — strong tech-literate audience interest
$3 billion repair fleet crisis — TeleGeography reports global cable repair ship fleet is critically underfunded
NATO created dedicated Critical Undersea Infrastructure division
~200 cable faults per year globally (SubmarineNetworks.com), 86% from fishing/anchoring

Existing Competition

TeleGeography Submarine Cable Map — the definitive map, but B2B-focused, no consumer narrative, no threat analysis, no incident tracking
SubseaCables.net (Telecom Review newsletter) — monthly industry newsletter, very technical, not consumer-facing
Abhishek Gautam personal blog (abhs.in) — excellent individual posts on Baltic sabotage and Red Sea impact, but manual one-off posts, not automated
GeoCables.com — research-oriented, has cable monitoring data, but not consumer-friendly format
Substack newsletters — occasional one-off posts (NextFinancial paid piece, OurOneOcean), not dedicated regular coverage
FormerLab/shadow-fleet-tracker-light — open source Baltic shadow fleet tracker with AIS & cable proximity alerts (39 stars)
GAP: No consumer-facing, beautifully designed, regularly-updated, data-driven site tracking submarine cable health, incidents, repair capacity, and geopolitical risks. The information exists in scattered B2B, academic, and government reports.

Data Sources Found

Primary Infrastructure Data

TeleGeography Submarine Cable Map GeoJSON — GitHub repo (delusan/www.submarinecablemap.com, 194 forks) with cable routes as MultiLineStrings and landing points as Points. FREE, regularly updated. 694 cable systems, 1,893 landings.
- URL: https://github.com/delusan/www.submarinecablemap.com
- Also: ArcGIS FeatureServer at services.arcgis.com (SubmarineCables FeatureServer)

Vessel Tracking (AIS)

AISHub — Free AIS vessel data exchange, 74,439 vessels (last 24h), 1,453 stations, 77 countries. JSON/XML/CSV API.
- URL: https://aishub.net/
- Requires contributing AIS data OR research account
aisstream.io — Free websocket API for real-time global AIS tracking. Track ship movements near cable routes.
- URL: https://aisstream.io/

Internet Health Monitoring

Cloudflare Radar API — FREE (free-tier works). Outages, BGP anomalies, traffic anomalies by country/ASN. Perfect for correlating internet disruptions to cable events.
- Outage endpoint: GET /radar/annotations/outages
- BGP anomaly endpoint: GET /radar/bgp/timeseries
- URL: https://developers.cloudflare.com/radar/
IODA (Internet Outage Detection & Analysis) — CAIDA project, free platform, monitors BGP, active probing, darknet for outages
- URL: https://ioda.caida.org/

Incident & News Monitoring

Google News API / RSS — submarine cable incident monitoring
RSS feeds: SubseaCables.net newsletter, TeleGeography blog
Government/org sources: CSIS, DHS advisories, NATO MARCOM, ICPC (International Cable Protection Committee)
Recorded Future open reports on submarine cable threats

Open Source Tools

FormerLab/shadow-fleet-tracker-light — Open source Baltic Sea shadow fleet tracker with cable proximity alerts. Python-based, no cloud needed.
- URL: https://github.com/FormerLab/shadow-fleet-tracker-light
- 1200+ vessels tracked, live AIS integration

Geopolitical Context

SIPRI (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute) — arms/conflict data
ACLED (Armed Conflict Location & Event Data) — maritime incident tracking
GDELT — news monitoring/sentiment for cable-related events

SEO Analysis

Keywords: “submarine cable map” (high volume, dominated by TeleGeography), “undersea cable sabotage” (growing fast), “internet cable cut” (spikes during incidents), “submarine cable security” (moderate, mostly B2B), “internet infrastructure risk” (growing)
Long-tail opportunities: “which submarine cables connect [country]”, “what happens if submarine cables are cut”, “submarine cable repair time”, “is my internet at risk from cable cuts”
Content gap: NO consumer-facing explainer content that’s updated regularly. All search results are news articles (one-off), B2B reports, or academic papers.
Opportunity: Rank for informational queries that spike 10-100x during cable incidents

Communities

r/geopolitics — 1.2M+ members, submarine cable posts get high engagement
r/networking — 650K+ members, cable infrastructure discussion
r/infrastructure — growing subreddit
Hacker News — 177+ upvotes on cable sabotage article = strong tech audience
Twitter/X — #SubmarinesCables, #SubseaCables, infosec community, geopolitics accounts
Telegram — OSINT channels frequently cover cable incidents

Image/Graphic Feasibility

Maps: Excellent — cable route GeoJSON data is freely available, can generate beautiful interactive and static maps with D3.js, Mapbox, or Leaflet
Data visualizations: Risk heatmaps, repair capacity dashboards, incident timelines, traffic reroute diagrams — all auto-generatable
AI illustrations: Cable cross-sections, repair ship operations, deep-sea scenarios — image generation works well for technical/infrastructure subjects
Infographics: “Your internet’s journey” — tracing a data packet across ocean floors, chokepoints, and vulnerabilities