The Quintillion Subsea Cable System should soon connect Tokyo to London with fiber-optic cables; thanks to global warming opening up the Northwest Passage in a few short years time:
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-world-is-melting-but-at-least-well-have-better-internet-because-of-itExtract: "Climate shift is mostly bad news, but it is now giving internet-lovers a half-hearted reason to cheer. “Thanks” to a warming planet and retreating pack-ice in the Arctic Ocean, installation of a 15,000 km undersea fiber-optic cable directly linking Europe and Asia for the first time is now possible.
It’s easy to forget that today’s internet is supported by a vast network of cables zig-zagging over 600,000 miles along our ocean floor. These tangled strips of wire now support basically all of our international communications, and as the internet has grown over the past two decades, so too has the size of this submarine network.
Until recently, the ships required to install these cables couldn’t navigate the icy Northwest Passage, the arctic sea route connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. But today that’s no longer the case."
See also (the source of the attached image):
http://fm.kuac.org/post/anchorage-firm-outlines-plans-bring-broadband-five-alaska-communities