FEATURE
BY YVONNE LIN
USER STORY: WEB MAPS SHARE DETAILED SUBMARINE CABLE DATA Reprinted with kind permission from: https://www.esri.com/en-us/landing-page/industry/telecommunications/2019/submarine-telecom-forum-case-study
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ubTel Forum is a media company located in the United States that serves hundreds of thousands of readers in over 100 countries. SubTel Forum publishes an independent commercial e-magazine, SubTel Forum, and complimentary digital and print publications that discuss the submarine telecommunications cable industry. SubTel Forum’s operating divisions provide data-driven business intelligence services (STF Analytics) and organize and manage conferences (STF Events).
CHALLENGE
Ninety-eight percent of the world’s internet runs on submarine fiber-optic cables, yet as an industry, we have not had a suitable, freely available mapping tool for our hundreds of subsea systems. SubTel Forum needed a mapping system that could incorporate years of various disparate submarine cable data and be easily used by industry person-
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nel throughout the world. The Submarine Cable Database enables analysis for the Submarine Cable Almanac, Cable Map, Industry Tender Package, and Industry Newsfeed. The Submarine Cable Database was developed in 2013 and modified with real-time data thereafter. It tracks more than 400 current and planned domestic and international cable systems, including project information suitable for querying filtered by client, year, project, region, system length, capacity, landing points, data centers, owners, and installers. The purpose-built Submarine Cable Database was developed by a dedicated database administration team and is powered by SQL and retained in a Microsoft Azure platform environment. Maps are produced with ArcGIS Pro, in the same format and visual style as SubTel Forum’s annually printed Submarine Cables of the World Interactive Map. Data is collected from the public domain, and the da-