Feb 11, 2025

How Do Wholesale Carriers Fit In the Global Traffic Picture?

Broadly speaking, telecom service providers have two ways of connecting traffic to a destination telco.

They can either connect directly with the destination carrier or route traffic to a wholesale carrier that connects to a destination telco.

Although many retail service providers, such as mobile operators, MVNOs, and cable broadband providers, rely heavily on wholesale carriers to transport and terminate their customers’ international calls, wholesale revenues are down 11% from ten years ago.

Let’s take a moment to dive in a bit and see what's going on.

Feb 6, 2025

The Podcast Goes Dark! (Dark Fiber, That is)

We haven't been getting enough fiber here at TeleGeography Explains the Internet, but we're about to change that.

Nutritional jokes aside, this week, we welcome Todd Chapman, a veteran in fiber development, to the hot seat. Todd walks us through the ins and outs of Layer 0 of the physical infrastructure underlying data transmission. Some classic explaining of the internet. 

In this episode, you'll get a walkthrough of the process that takes a fiber project from manufacturing to lit service—get ready to learn a thing or two about different types of fiber and their uses. We also get some good explanations of the dark fiber market and an overview of when enterprises might be interested in leasing dark fiber instead of lit service.

Here's a glimpse at what we discussed. Scroll to the bottom to listen to the whole discussion in its fiber-rich glory.

Feb 5, 2025

An Interconnectivity Expert's Take on Emerging Hubs, AI, and Network Resilience in 2025

Digital Infrastructure Industry Expert Maya Glick has two decades in the digital infrastructure and telecommunications game.

Feb 3, 2025

New Regional Map Depicts 77 Cable Systems Connected to Africa

Make some space on your wall.

The 2025 Africa Telecommunications Map is out—and it pairs perfectly with this year’s Submarine Cable Map.

Feb 3, 2025

Is It Sabotage? Unraveling the Mystery of Undersea Cable Breaks

Lately, I've been thinking about the movie director Alfred Hitchcock. One of his first big hits was a 1936 film called Sabotage.

Jan 30, 2025

What You Need to Know About Network as a Service in 2025

Welcome back, TeleGeography Explains the Internet listeners. We took a nice long break for the holidays, and we've returned refreshed with another batch of telecom conversations for your feed.

Our first guest of 2025 is Fahim Sabir, Director of Digital Solutions at Colt.

Jan 29, 2025

Peering Into the European Bandwidth Market

The European telecommunications market has been a global trailblazer in terms of innovation, affordability of service, and infrastructure deployment. Few markets in the world have seen comparable levels of investment and competition.

Europe also crucially interconnects regions, providing key hubs for traffic exchange and access to content for Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

The 2024 Capacity Europe conference in London highlighted the industry's progress and the challenges that lie ahead in the near and medium term. TeleGeography was there, not only with submarine cable maps in hand but also moderating panels on subsea cable route diversity and discussing current market trends with the industry’s leading experts.

So what did we learn?

Jan 28, 2025

An Alternative To Aerial and Underground Fiber, or Just a Pipe Dream?

Our team always talks about the fiber-optic cables running across the ocean. But what about running fiber through… water pipes?

Here are the top headlines circulating in TeleGeography’s Slack channels lately.

Jan 22, 2025

The Impact of AI on Submarine Cable Networks [Presentation Download]

Last week, Research Director Alan Mauldin joined Ciena’s Brian Lavallée for a live webinar exploring the technical and strategic drivers transforming the AI landscape.

Jan 20, 2025

Futuristic 2025 Submarine Cable Map Unveils the Networks of Tomorrow

Happy New Year? Now it is, because we just dropped our 2025 Submarine Cable Map.

Sponsored by Telecom Egypt, this futuristic, high-contrast design depicts 597 cable systems and 1,712 landings that are currently active or under construction.