Submarine-Cable Jurisdiction Trace

The physical internet has a geopolitics. This traces a submarine cable's route — where it lands and every sovereign jurisdiction the wire crosses — and flags the high-interception or sanctioned territories along the way. For anyone weighing the geopolitical and interception risk of how data physically travels.

How it uses the graph

Traverses the physical, GeoIP layers of the graph, in 4 steps:

How it walks the graph4 steps
01Cable landings

Enumerating the cable's physical landing points…

physicalGeoIP
02Transit-jurisdiction exposure set

Aggregating the sovereign jurisdictions the path transits…

physicalGeoIP
03High-interception / sanctioned landings

Flagging landings in high-interception or sanctioned states…

physicalGeoIP
04Co-landing chokepoint density

Measuring how many other cables share each landing country…

physicalGeoIP

Why each step runs

  1. 01Cable landings. Walks CABLE_LANDS_AT to list every CABLE_LANDING this cable terminates at — the city/country/lat-long that defines where the wire physically touches land.
  2. 02Transit-jurisdiction exposure set. Collapses landings to the distinct set of sovereign countries — the states that sit on the physical path and can tap, interdict or sever the link.
  3. 03High-interception / sanctioned landings. Intersects the jurisdiction set with the watch list to surface landing countries with elevated interception or sanctions risk on this physical route.
  4. 04Co-landing chokepoint density. For each jurisdiction on the path, counts the other submarine cables that also land there — physical chokepoints where one sovereign sits astride many links at once.