An curved arrow pointing right. Computer science Professor Paul Barford and a team of researchers recently published the first publicly available map of the US's long-haul fiber-optic cable network.

Since the 1850s, we've been laying cables across oceans to become better connected. Today, there are hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber optic cables constantly transmitting data between nations.

If you look at websites such as the Submarine Cable Map, you can quickly ... efforts to map Africa's fiber optic networks. In the process, it became clear that network operators had previously ...