ISPs no longer dominate the submarine cable bandwidth scene. Content providers do.
This was a key message of Tim Stronge's opening presentation during last week's webinar "TDM is Taking on Water—Packets to the Rescue," a collaboration between TeleGeography and Ciena.
Tim kicked the webinar off with a discussion about the changing face of undersea capacity demand, covering the internet's historic dominance in international capacity usage.
To watch the webinar on demand, click the button below.
As far as webinar highlights go—it would seem that change is on the way, as content providers are edging in, making up larger and larger shares of international capacity usage on major routes. (We're looking at you, Trans-Atlantic route.)
And with market power shifting to a few key buyers—those aforementioned content providers—Tim noted that we might have an oligopsony on our hands. (Oligopsony was our webinar word of the day, meaning market power put in the hands of relatively few buyers.)
In turn, it's no surprise that we're seeing more content provider cable investments.
Next up, Ciena's Brian Lavallée honed in on packetized cable landing stations, studying packet migration and wavelength switching at cable landing stations.
Legacy time division multiplexing (TDM) services are being replaced by packet-based services over most terrestrial networks. Subsequently, the subsea cable networks that interconnect these network islands must be able to handle the packet traffic.
Brian's takeaways?
- Legacy protocols are being replaced by packets—and quickly.
- Carrier-grade packet switches do what TDM switches did.
- Native packet-switching cable landing stations are on the way.
Tim Stronge
Tim Stronge is VP of Research at TeleGeography. His responsibilities span across many of our research practices including network infrastructure, bandwidth demand modeling, cross-border traffic flows, and telecom services pricing.