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You can estimate whether a connection crosses a submarine cable, but no ordinary public tool can prove the exact cable carrying one individual flow. Start with a traceroute from your own network, compare it with measurements from other vantage points, inspect the relevant BGP route, map the inferred links with a cross-layer tool such as Nautilus, and check whether submarine-cable systems connect the indicated landing regions. Report the result as a time- and vantage-specific inference—“likely” or “consistent with”—unless the network operator confirms the physical path.
What you can—and cannot—learn
A submarine cable is a physical fiber system laid under the sea between landing stations. Internet traffic may cross one when the networks at each end select an international path that uses that system, but the packets do not carry a field naming the cable. Public measurements expose different layers of the journey:
- Traceroute reports responding IP routers seen from one source to one destination.
- BGP data shows network-level route announcements and autonomous-system paths observed by a particular router or collector.
- Cross-layer mapping proposes a relationship between observed IP links and physical cables, with an uncertainty or confidence value.
- Cable maps show known systems and landing points, providing geographic context rather than proof of a packet path.
These views can agree strongly enough to support a careful conclusion, but each has blind spots. Routers may not answer probes, networks can select different upstreams, routes change, and a mapped cable line may be stylized. A route measured from a remote looking glass is not silently substituted for the route from your home connection.
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TeleGeography says it tracks more than 600 active and planned submarine cables in 2026. That is a count of systems in its database, changing as systems enter service or are decommissioned; it is not the percentage of any particular user’s traffic that travels by submarine cable.
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Choose a precise measurement target
Decide what “my traffic” means before you measure. A route to a website’s hostname may resolve to different IP addresses over time, and a service may use a content-delivery site or cloud region that is geographically closer than the company’s headquarters. Record the exact hostname and the destination IP returned during the test.
- Source: your public connection, including its provider and approximate city or country.
- Destination: the hostname, resolved IP address, and protocol or port if relevant.
- Time: the start time in UTC, because routing and congestion are dynamic.
- Question: whether the outbound path from your network probably crosses a subsea link, not whether every packet in a session uses the same path.
A connection can be entirely terrestrial, cross one sea and then continue by land, or change to another route after a failure. The same destination can therefore produce a different answer from another provider, city, or hour.
Step 1: Run and save a traceroute from your own network
Traceroute sends probes with progressively larger hop limits. Each responding router can report its address and round-trip time, giving you the most direct public view of the path leaving your connection. The IP addresses are network-router identifiers, not submarine-cable labels.
Windows
- Open Command Prompt.
- Run
tracert example.com, replacing the hostname with your target. - Wait for the command to finish, then save the complete output with the target, local provider, approximate location, and UTC time.
macOS or Linux
- Open Terminal.
- Run
traceroute example.com. On a system without the command, install the operating system’s standard traceroute package or use an equivalent network diagnostic supplied by the administrator. - Save the output and note the address returned by DNS at the time of the test.
Rows containing asterisks mean that a probe did not receive a response before the timeout. They do not automatically mean that traffic stopped or that a cable is missing: many routers filter or rate-limit traceroute responses while forwarding ordinary packets. A route can also show private or carrier-internal addresses that provide little geographic information.
Repeat enough to see stability
Run several measurements a few minutes apart and, if practical, at a different time of day. Preserve each output rather than keeping only the most attractive result. Identical early hops with a changing international segment suggest a routing choice that is conditional, not a single permanent cable assignment.
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Step 2: Compare a remote traceroute or looking-glass view
A looking glass is a router or measurement service operated in another network. It can run traceroute or display a route lookup from that remote point. The IETF’s RFC 8522 documents a standard command set for looking-glass services, including traceroute and route lookup.
Use the remote result as a comparison, not as a replacement:
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- Run traceroute to the same destination IP when the service permits an address target.
- Record the looking-glass router’s city or facility, autonomous system, command, and UTC retrieval time.
- Compare the sequence of networks and regional transitions with your own trace.
The RIPE NCC Looking Glass API provides route observations associated with RIPE RIS collectors and peers. Its documentation describes the data as near real time with processing delay, so retain the collector location, peer context, and retrieval timestamp with the result.
Different paths are normal. A remote router may be on the far side of the ocean, use a different transit provider, or select an entirely different cable system. Never merge your forward traceroute with a remote reverse-looking path and describe the combined hops as one physical route.
Step 3: Inspect the BGP path without confusing it with a packet trace
Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) distributes reachability for IP prefixes between autonomous systems. A BGP lookup can show which networks announced the destination prefix and which autonomous-system sequence a particular collector or looking glass observed. It helps explain why a traceroute may enter a particular international provider, but it does not reveal the per-packet forwarding path or the name of a physical cable.
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What to record
- The destination prefix containing the resolved IP address.
- The collector or looking-glass location.
- The peer and autonomous-system path shown by that vantage point.
- The time retrieved and any processing-delay note supplied by the service.
A BGP path can differ from the path used for one packet because of routing policy, load balancing, traffic engineering, convergence, or a change after the route was collected. bgpmap.net explains how multi-vantage BGP maps differ from looking-glass and traceroute measurements. Use its visualizations to compare network views, not to claim that a drawn line is a cable.
Step 4: Map IP links to candidate submarine cables
After collecting a traceroute, submit the data to a cross-layer mapper. The University of California, Irvine’s Nautilus accepts traceroute data and attempts to associate IP links with terrestrial and submarine infrastructure. It presents candidate cable names and confidence scores.
How to interpret a Nautilus result
- Candidate link: a model’s proposed physical relationship for an observed network hop or link.
- Cable name: a possible system, not a label read from the packet.
- Confidence: the mapper’s estimate based on available datasets and correlations, not a carrier confirmation.
Inspect which traceroute rows were mapped, which were left unresolved, and whether the proposed landing regions fit the source and destination. A high-confidence segment can still be wrong if the underlying IP geolocation, topology, or cable inventory is incomplete. Preserve the mapper’s output and confidence value alongside the original trace.
Step 5: Check landing points and cable systems on infrastructure maps
Use an infrastructure map to test geographic plausibility after, not before, the network measurements. TeleGeography’s Submarine Cable FAQs describes searching cable systems by cable name, country, landing point, service year, and status. Check whether a candidate system connects landing regions consistent with the observed network path and whether its service status matches the measurement date.
The map is context, not a packet-level trace. TeleGeography’s FAQ states: “No. The cable routes on our map are stylized and do not reflect the precise geolocation of systems.” A line drawn between two coastlines should therefore not be read as the exact seabed position or proof that your flow used it.
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The ITU Broadband Map includes submarine-cable and transmission-network layers. Use it to compare landing locations and broader terrestrial connectivity. Neither the ITU layer nor a commercial map alone establishes which cable carried an individual connection.
How the methods differ
| Method | Vantage point | Layer | Evidence type | What it can support | Main limitation |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Traceroute from your connection | Your provider and local network | Responding IP hops | Direct measurement of one source-to-destination attempt | Which routers and networks answered along the outbound path | Non-responding hops, changing routes, and no cable name |
| Remote traceroute or looking glass | A selected remote router | IP hops or route lookup | Direct measurement from another network | How another vantage point reaches the destination | Not your home route; geography and policy differ |
| BGP collector or looking glass | A named collector, peer, or router | Routing announcements | Network-level control-plane view | Observed autonomous-system path and prefix reachability | Not the per-packet forwarding path or physical cable |
| Nautilus-style cross-layer mapping | Based on supplied measurements and datasets | IP-to-infrastructure correlation | Inferred model with confidence | Candidate terrestrial or submarine links and cable names | Dependent on data quality; not direct observation inside a cable |
| Submarine-cable map | Geographic infrastructure inventory | Physical systems and landing points | Contextual reference | Whether a proposed route is geographically plausible | Displayed lines are stylized and do not prove an individual flow |
Build a defensible conclusion
Write the finding so another person can reproduce the observation and understand its limits. Include all of the following:
- Source network and approximate measurement location.
- Target hostname, resolved IP, and destination prefix.
- UTC time for each local and remote measurement.
- Complete traceroute output, including unanswered hops.
- Remote vantage point, autonomous system, or looking-glass service.
- BGP collector or peer details and retrieval time.
- Cross-layer mapping result, candidate cable names, and confidence values.
- Map used, candidate landing points, and the map or data retrieval date.
A suitable report sentence is: “A traceroute from the measured source network and location to the destination at the recorded UTC time, interpreted with the mapping tool and checked against the cable map, is consistent with traffic crossing the candidate cable or region. This is an inference from public routing and infrastructure data, not confirmation from the carrier that this exact flow used that cable.”
Use confidence language consistently
- Likely: several independent observations agree, the candidate landing regions fit, and the mapper reports meaningful confidence.
- Consistent with: the evidence fits a cable or region, but an important link, hop, or vantage point is unresolved.
- Not established: measurements conflict, the route is incomplete, or no candidate infrastructure can be connected without speculation.
Common failure modes
Assuming a missing hop means a cable break
An asterisk in traceroute usually means that router did not answer the probe. Continue examining later hops and corroborate with another measurement; do not infer a physical outage from silence at one hop.
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IP geolocation databases can identify a city, provider, or registration address rather than the router’s physical site. An address near a coast does not prove a landing station, and an address inland may represent a provider’s administrative location.
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Reading a BGP map as a cable map
Autonomous-system links describe relationships between networks. They do not identify the fiber pair, landing facility, or seabed route used by a packet.
Assuming the shortest geographic line is the selected route
Providers choose paths using commercial agreements, capacity, resiliency, policy, and engineering constraints. A longer route or a landing in another country can be normal.
Ignoring time and route changes
Maintenance, failures, traffic engineering, and BGP convergence can change the path. A result without a timestamp cannot be interpreted reliably later.
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Calling a remote result “my route”
Every trace belongs to its source network. Label remote observations explicitly and keep them separate from the home connection’s forward path.
When public measurements are not enough
Public tools cannot see encrypted payloads, carrier-internal optical telemetry, or every forwarding decision. They may also lack current topology and cable-inventory data. If the distinction matters for an outage investigation, compliance record, capacity purchase, or incident report, ask the relevant network operator or transit provider for confirmation of the physical route and the time interval covered. Treat that operator statement as separate evidence from your public measurements.
For ordinary troubleshooting, the practical answer is usually regional rather than cable-specific: your trace may be consistent with an ocean crossing toward a particular landing region, while the exact system, fiber pair, and packet-by-packet path remain unknown.
A repeatable checklist
- Resolve the target hostname and record the IP address.
- Run traceroute from the connection under investigation and save the complete output.
- Repeat the local test to identify stable and changing segments.
- Run a remote traceroute or looking-glass query and label its vantage point.
- Look up the destination prefix and record the BGP collector, peer, path, and retrieval time.
- Submit the trace to Nautilus or a comparable cross-layer mapper; save candidate links and confidence.
- Check candidate landing regions and system status in TeleGeography and the ITU Broadband Map.
- Compare all observations without combining separate forward and reverse paths.
- Write a time- and vantage-specific conclusion using “likely,” “consistent with,” or “not established.”
- Archive the outputs, map version or retrieval date, and exact commands so the result can be repeated.
Bottom line
You can investigate a subsea route reliably enough to identify a plausible ocean crossing, network path, and candidate cable system, but a home traceroute cannot directly reveal the cable. The strongest public case combines your own timestamped trace, clearly labeled remote and BGP observations, a confidence-scored cross-layer mapping, and a landing-point check on an infrastructure map. The honest result remains an inference tied to that source, destination, network state, and time.
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