The signal grid.
The planet has grown a nervous system, and it lives in four strata: 16,472 active satellites overhead — two-thirds of them belonging to a single company — 722 submarine cables under the sea, 5,257 interconnection facilities on the ground where the traffic changes hands, and the radio layer in everyone's pocket. This report reads all four from the public catalogs, through a signals-intelligence lens held to one law: only what the record documents. The map below stacks the strata; the registry's own census closes the loop — a few thousand content networks drive the traffic that twelve thousand access networks consume, and they meet in 1,320 rooms, the largest of them in São Paulo. Every figure is computed from the records at render time.
published 2026-08-28 · data cutoff 2026-08-28 (live catalogs at retrieval) · edition 1 — updated only by a new dated edition · sources: CelesTrak · TeleGeography · PeeringDB · ITU
Four layers, one planet.
The signal layer, stacked. ORBIT pins the geostationary ring at its true longitudes — those 585 satellites genuinely stand still, so they can be mapped; the 15,660 in low orbit move too fast to pin and are counted instead, honestly. SEA draws all 722 cables and their 1,922 landings. ATTACHED lights the 5,257 rooms where networks interconnect. GROUND shades every country by how connected its people are. Toggle the layers; stack them all for the whole nervous system.
One company is two-thirds of the sky.
Active satellites by launch year. The chart has one story: a cliff. Everything before 2019 is the old space age — governments, science, the GEO ring. Then Starlink begins, and today 11,042 of the 16,472 active satellites — 67% — belong to one company, with OneWeb's 651 the distant second constellation.
Who drives the bits, and who drinks them.
The registry where networks declare themselves answers the upstream/downstream question in its own words: 2,655 content networks drive the traffic; 12,384 cable, DSL and ISP networks — the eyeballs — consume it; 4,172 transit networks carry it between. And they meet physically, in internet exchanges — the largest of which is not in Frankfurt or Ashburn but São Paulo, where 1,852 networks interconnect.
What the catalogs admit.
The signals-intelligence layer, from the record alone: the public catalog's military group names 24 active satellites; navigation constellations — GPS, Galileo, BeiDou — add 117 dual-use platforms; and 3,992 active satellites carry no purpose tag at all in the public groups. This page shows what the catalogs admit; what they do not admit is not invented here. The gap is itself the finding.
Where every number comes from.
Four registries, read verbatim. CelesTrak's GP catalog (every active object's orbital elements, plus its named purpose groups) · TeleGeography's submarine cable map (every cable's path and landing, as published) · PeeringDB (exchanges, facilities, and every network's self-declared type) · the ITU's mobile-subscription record via Our World in Data. All fetched 2026-08-28; all in data.json and sea.json beside this page.
The geostationary trick, stated. A GEO satellite's longitude is computed from its orbital elements at their epoch (right ascension + argument of perigee + mean anomaly − sidereal time), accurate to roughly a degree. It works because the ring stands still. Low and medium orbits do not — those satellites are counted, classed by mean motion, and never drawn at a fake position.
The SIGINT lens, bounded. "Military" on this page means membership in the catalog's military group — 24 satellites at retrieval. States operate more than their public catalogs admit; this page does not estimate that gap, it states that the gap exists. No purpose is inferred from an orbit, a name, or a rumor.
The census is declarations, not measurements. PeeringDB types are self-declared. A traffic measurement would be a different dataset; the flow exhibit says what it is.
What this page does not do. No coverage claims, no capability claims, no attribution of purpose beyond the record. The registries argue; the page draws.