Support
For Wet Plant on the App Store and on the web
Wet Plant is made by one person. There is no help desk and no ticket queue, just an email that comes straight to me. If something is broken, wrong or confusing, the answers below or a short message will sort it out.
Get in touch
somekidpaul@me.com. I read everything that arrives. If it is a bug, including your device and OS version saves a round trip. If a number looks wrong, tell me which one and what you expected, because that is the kind of report this project most wants.
Common questions
What is a wet plant?
It is the industry's own term for everything in a submarine cable system that sits underwater, bounded by the beach manhole at each end. The part on land is the dry plant. The name is insider jargon on purpose.
Where does the data come from?
The cables, their routes and their landing points come from TeleGeography, who published the data under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 in a public repository they have since retired. Current terms are theirs to set. The live disruption signal comes from Georgia Tech's IODA project, which measures country-level internet reachability. Nothing on the globe is invented, and the About panel in both the app and this site lists every source and labels every figure as measured, modelled or computed.
What does "countries disrupted" actually mean?
It is a count of countries that IODA currently flags as having a reachability problem and where at least one cable lands. It is not a claim that a specific cable is cut. Submarine cable faults are not published live by anyone, so this is the honest proxy: a country-level signal, labelled as one.
Why does it sometimes show two dashes instead of a number?
Because the disruption feed could not be reached. A zero would be an all-clear that was never measured, so the app shows that it does not know instead of implying everything is fine.
The map is missing a cable, or one looks wrong.
The dataset covers 703 systems and is a snapshot, so new builds and recent route changes can lag. Corrections belong upstream with TeleGeography, but send them to me too and I will refresh the data.
Does the tip unlock anything?
No. Both the app and the site are free and complete, and the tip exists only if you want to leave one. Nothing is gated, hidden or degraded without it.
The two reach the same place by different routes. In the app it is an in-app purchase, which is what Apple requires. On the site it is the Tip control in the header, which links out to Ko-fi.
Known limits
- Disruption is country-level, not per cable. No public source publishes live per-cable faults.
- Round-trip time is computed from a cable's length and the speed of light in fibre. It is not measured.
- The cable dataset is a snapshot bundled with each release, not a live feed.
- Cable colour is arbitrary. It separates neighbouring lines and carries no meaning.
Privacy
No account, no analytics, no tracking. The full detail is on the privacy page.