THE CABLE REPORT
INSTRUCTIONS · HOW TO USE THE PLATFORM
The Cable Report is a live picture of risk to the world’s submarine cable network. Every 10 minutes it correlates open event feeds (earthquakes, conflict, tropical cyclones, river flooding and vessel movements) against the routes of 700+ cable systems, scores what matters, and shows you the result on one screen. This page explains how to read that screen and get the most out of it. For exactly how the numbers are calculated, see the
Methodology.
SIXTY-SECOND START
1Open the live console. The number at the top, the Cable Risk Index, is the one-line answer to “how risky is the network right now?” (0-100). 2Find a cable you care about: type its name into the search box (top-centre on desktop, the SEARCH tab on a phone). Pick it and the map flies to it and opens its detail card.
3Read the card: where it lands, who owns it, how deep it runs, how far the nearest repair ship is, and what natural or fishing hazards it passes through.
4Press ☆ WATCH. Watched cables get their own list, their own map filter, and an alert filter that shows only what touches them.
5Open the ALERTS tab on the right to see what the risk engine is currently flagging, and subscribe to the daily brief to have it emailed each morning. THE SCREEN AT A GLANCE
Top barBrand, the Cable Risk Index, live counts (HIGH and ELEVATED alerts, cable systems in a threat radius, inter-market routes at risk, listed companies exposed, flagged vessels), theme toggle, daily brief link and a UTC clock.
Search (below the top bar)Find any cable by name and jump to it.
Left panelCABLE VIEW controls (colouring and filters), map layer switches, your ASSET WATCHLIST and CORRIDOR WATCH.
MapEvery cable route, landing station and live event. Click anything for detail.
Right panelTabs for ALERTS, ROUTES, EXPOSURE, SITREP and COMMS, plus a ★ WATCHED filter.
Cable detail cardAppears when you select a cable: facts, hazards and live marine weather.
Index tickerStrip near the bottom: the Cable Risk Index, route stress and each corridor index with a sparkline and its change since the last pass.
Status barA dot per data feed (green = live), the time of the last risk pass, and links to these pages.
FINDING A CABLE
On desktop the search box sits top-centre, just under the top bar. On a phone, tap SEARCH in the bottom bar to open it. Type any part of a cable’s name; matches that start with what you typed are listed first. Use ↑ ↓ to move through the list, Enter to choose, Esc to clear. Choosing a cable highlights it on the map, flies the map to it, and opens its detail card. You can also simply click any cable line on the map: the clickable zone is much wider than the drawn line, and where several cables run together you are offered a list to pick from (zoom in to separate them).
Tip: names follow the industry’s own, so “2Africa”, “MAREA”, “SEA-ME-WE” and “Grace Hopper” all work; so does a landing region such as “Africa”.
READING THE MAP
Cable colour depends on the CABLE VIEW setting in the left panel:
- RISK (default) colours each cable by its current alert state: HIGHELEVATEDMONITORINGNOMINAL
- SYSTEMS gives every cable its own identity colour, useful for telling neighbouring systems apart.
Filters: ALL shows the whole network, AT RISK only cables named in a live alert, WATCHED only your watchlist.
Layers are grouped into the cable network (cables, landing stations, inter-market routes), threat context (conflict events, earthquakes, tropical cyclones, Baltic vessel tracks, precipitation radar) and dependent infrastructure (data-centre hubs, cloud regions, semiconductor sites). Switch any layer off to declutter. Click a landing station to see which cables come ashore there; click an event marker for what it is and which assets are inside its threat radius.
THE CABLE DETAIL CARD
Each line on the card is a fact you can act on. Fields only appear when we have the data.
RFS / Length / Landings / CapacityReady-for-service year, route length, number of landing points, and design capacity in Tbps (or fibre pairs where capacity is not published).
Owners / Landing countriesWho owns or operates the system and which countries it lands in.
SourceWhere our record for this cable comes from. Our clean-room dataset is independently sourced.
Route note & geometry fidelityRoutes are schematic connectivity between landing points, not as-laid seabed positions. The fidelity grade tells you whether distances quoted for this route are route-accurate or corridor-level.
Seafloor depthDepth range along the route. Anything under 200 m crosses the continental shelf, where anchors and trawlers cause most faults.
Restoration reachDistance from the route's most remote stretch to the nearest repair base, and the best-case steaming time. If the regional ship is already busy, repairs can take weeks.
Natural-hazard exposureWhether the route passes a documented submarine canyon with a cable-fault history, and a live signal of whether its feeding river is running high (an active turbidity window).
Fishing exposureBottom-contact fishing intensity along the route, the single largest cause of cable faults worldwide.
Wind / Gusts / Waves / SwellLive marine weather at the point you clicked.
☆ WATCH adds the cable to your watchlist; press it again to remove. The × closes the card.
ALERTS, ROUTES AND THE RIGHT PANEL
ALERTS lists what the risk engine is flagging now, newest and most severe first. Each alert is scored 0-100 and tiered: HIGH (70+), ELEVATED (40-69), MONITORING (below 40). Click an alert to fly to it; the map pulses at the event location. Every alert has a permanent link you can share or cite.
ROUTES tracks 12 inter-market connections (New York⇄London, Europe⇄Singapore and so on). For each, it shows how many of the cable systems serving that route are currently named in an ELEVATED or HIGH alert, in other words how much of the route’s redundancy is under stress.
EXPOSURE (desktop) lists publicly listed companies with a stake in the cables currently at risk. SITREP is a plain-English situation summary of the current picture. COMMS (desktop) drafts a wire-style post you can copy.
★ WATCHED filters the alert list to only alerts touching cables on your watchlist. On desktop the ✕ collapses the panel to give the map more room; a reopen button brings it back.
YOUR WATCHLIST
Watch a cable from its detail card (☆ WATCH). Watched cables appear under ASSET WATCHLIST in the left panel (click one to jump to it; × removes it), can be isolated on the map with the WATCHED filter, and drive the ★ WATCHED alert filter. The watchlist is saved in your browser, so it is private and needs no account; it will not follow you to another device.
Organisations that want a watchlist monitored continuously, with alerts delivered into their own tools (API, Slack, Teams, email), can talk to us about a design-partner arrangement: intel@thecablereport.com.
CORRIDORS AND THE INDEX TICKER
CORRIDOR WATCH (left panel) lists the world’s major cable chokepoints, each with a status and a standing risk index out of 100. Click a corridor to fly the map to it. The index ticker along the bottom repeats the Cable Risk Index, route stress and every corridor index with a sparkline of recent history and the change since the last pass, so you can see at a glance what is moving. The full time series is on the History page.
ON A PHONE
Mobile is map-first. The bottom bar has three drawers: LAYERS (the left-panel controls), SEARCH (find a cable) and ALERTS (the right-panel tabs). Tap to open, tap again or use × to close. The desktop-only extras (the metrics row, EXPOSURE and COMMS tabs, and the index ticker) are hidden on small screens to keep the map usable.
BEYOND THE CONSOLE
Daily briefA morning summary of the risk picture at /brief, by email and RSS (/feed.xml). Subscribe from the brief page.
HistoryThe Cable Risk Index and corridor indices over time, at /history.
Event linksEvery alert has a shareable permanent page you can cite or paste into a report.
MethodologyExactly how every score is calculated, with the scoring code published in full, at /methodology.
APIA versioned API (alerts, passes, history, watchlists) is available to design partners. Ask at intel@thecablereport.com.
Light / darkThe ☀ / ☾ button in the top bar switches theme; your choice is remembered.
READING THE NUMBERS RESPONSIBLY
- Cable routes are indicative, drawn between landing points rather than as laid on the seabed. Treat distances as corridor-level unless the detail card says the route positions come from an authoritative source (it names the source and its licence when they do).
- Vessel flags describe behaviour (loitering, being on station near a route, or being a vessel tied to a past incident). They are not attribution and imply no intent.
- Alerts flag proximity and conditions. They do not mean a cable has been damaged; confirmed faults come from operators.
- The Cable Report is an intelligence and awareness tool, not a navigational or operational product.
- Cite figures as “The Cable Report (thecablereport.com)” with the time of reading, since scores move as events develop.