GeoTraceroute
Traceroutes on a 3D globe and submarine cables
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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/joinSalim
HN · launched Apr 29, 2026 · 21 upvotes (top 24%) · 0 views
Niche: network monitoring and diagnostics tools · 193 launches, 11 in the last 7 days ▼ -35% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Observability & eval
- Developer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 193 launches in network monitoring and diagnostics tools →
Could you build this?
Partial While the 3D globe visualization and basic traceroute running can be vibe-coded, inferring real-world submarine cable paths and maintaining a network of 300+ distributed volunteer nodes require specialized network datasets and community infrastructure.
What it would actually take: The architecture requires a distributed network daemon installed across volunteer nodes, reporting back to a central API via WebSockets. The visualization uses Three.js or Cesium with open submarine cable GeoJSON data (like TeleGeography) matched via complex routing heuristics/BGP path inference to IP hops. The hard parts are the submarine cable topological routing algorithms and managing reliable, abuse-resistant volunteer probe agents.
Discussion
1 comment analyzed.
Concerns raised: 3D worldview has low quality on some browsers
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 132 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #42 of 133 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 182 days after the earliest competitor.
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- Global Maritime Chokepoints · hn · 2026-03-13 · 16 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- Submarius · hn · 2026-06-20 · 14 upvotes · similarity 0.40
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