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GeoTraceroute – Traceroutes on a 3D globe and submarine cables

GeoTraceroute – Traceroutes on a 3D globe and submarine cables

by Himred·Apr 29, 2026·21 points·1 comment
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AI Analysis

●●●BangerWizardryRabbit Hole

Infers invisible submarine cable paths using A* pathfinding between ocean-crossing hops.

Strengths
  • •A* pathfinding infers subsea routes where ICMP data is physically impossible to get.
  • •320 volunteer-run nodes across 50 countries creates a genuinely distributed mesh.
  • •Topological mode abstracts geography to show pure network latency and hop relationships.
Weaknesses
  • •Coverage is heavily skewed toward US and EU, leaving Asia and Africa sparse.
  • •Submarine inference is unvalidated; the author admits there is no ground truth.
Category
Data
Target Audience

Network engineers, sysadmins, and internet infrastructure enthusiasts

Similar To

RIPE Atlas · PingPlotter · VisualRoute

Post Description

I've been working on GeoTraceroute for a while and just shipped v2.3 with submarine cable inference.

A few things that might interest HN:

- 320 community-contributed nodes across 50 countries, all volunteer-run - Three views: 3D globe with day/night rendering, 2D map, and a topological mode that infers submarine cable routing - The submarine cable inference is the part I find most interesting. Since cable routers don't respond to ICMP, the underwater segments are invisible to standard traceroute. The tool detects ocean crossings by geolocation delta between consecutive hops, then infers the likely cable using a geo graph of landing points with A* pathfinding. I have no way to validate this — if anyone has ideas, I'd love to discuss.

Coverage is good in EU and US but thin in Asia, Africa and South America. If you want to contribute a node: https://geotraceroute.com/join

Salim

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