Ports, chokepoints and infrastructure

Port and chokepoint traffic, what a port can handle, and the fixed geography of the sea: cables, pipelines, terminals and boundaries.

What is normal for this port or strait, and what has changed? The IMF’s PortWatch is the free answer for traffic volumes at ports and chokepoints; the NGA’s World Port Index tells you what a port can physically handle. The rest of this page is the fixed geography of the sea: cables, pipelines, terminals and the boundaries that decide whose rules apply.

Ports and chokepoints

  • IMF PortWatch · Free · International Monetary Fund with the University of Oxford · Daily port calls and trade volume estimates for about 1,800 ports and transit counts for the main chokepoints, updated weekly, with an ArcGIS API. The figures are modelled from AIS and get revised.
  • NGA World Port Index · Free · US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency · Publication 150: location, depths, facilities and services for several thousand ports, as a spreadsheet or GIS layer.
  • UNCTAD Liner Shipping Connectivity Index · Free · UN Trade and Development · Quarterly index of how well each country and port is connected to container shipping networks, inside the UNCTADstat data centre.
  • Container Port Performance Index · Free · World Bank and S&P Global Market Intelligence · Annual ranking of about 400 container ports by time in port, built from AIS, with the report and the data file for download.
  • Port Optimizer · Free account · Port of Los Angeles with Wabtec · Volumes, forecasts and container tracking for the port of Los Angeles. One of the few ports that publishes forward-looking data.

Cables, pipelines and boundaries

  • TeleGeography Submarine Cable Map · Free · TeleGeography · The standard interactive map of submarine cables and landing stations, covering 694 systems in its 2026 edition.
  • SubTel Forum Cable Map · Free · Submarine Telecoms Forum · A second cable map that also shows the cable-ship fleet and planned systems.
  • Global Gas Infrastructure Tracker · Free (CC BY 4.0) · Global Energy Monitor · LNG terminals and gas pipelines worldwide, with ownership and status, downloadable after a short form.
  • Marine Regions · Free · Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ) · Exclusive economic zones, territorial seas and other maritime boundaries as downloadable geodata. The reference layer for “whose waters is this ship in”.
  • OpenInfraMap · Free · Russ Garrett · Power lines, telecoms, oil and gas infrastructure drawn from OpenStreetMap, including offshore platforms and pipelines.

Last checked 2026-10-12.