Pretty interesting. I'd be cool to have one that showed the cables on land too. I wonder if there's a tool like that, be useful to plan where the best connectively is if you are building your own datacenter for example.
If you're building your own datacenter (and by this I define a serious project with a budget $20m+), you're going to be hiring a person as a full time staff member who knows where all of the actual OSI layer 1 and 2 operators have infrastructure in your local state/province. For example the persons who are employed by Sabey related to their huge datacenter operations in Quincy, WA.
Much of who actually 'owns' fiber in a region is opaque for competition reasons. You have the company that actually laid the cable, then you have companies which may have purchased a few dark strands or IRUs in the cable, then you have a myriad of companies that are leasing dark and installing their own DWDM systems.
Where you can get access to dark also depends on geography and opaque business relationships. There's a lot of places in the US where a 288-count fiber cable goes through but here's no regen hut or POP built to access it. You need you build backwards or forwards along the path to get to the nearest place with active electronic equipment.
I was just thinking the same thing. Not just for datacenter planning, mind you, but even for a neat representation of which cities are more likely to have high-speed Internet connectivity; there are probably significant differences in expected speeds and costs between some city way out in the middle of nowhere and some city sitting right on top of a major data artery.
