The Blog

As a new year approaches, so does our annual workshop on all things telecom.

At PTC ’25, Brianna Boudreau, Jon Hjembo, and Alan Mauldin will return to the conference stage to share fresh insights on pricing, interconnection, submarine cables, bandwidth, and more.

A big part of last year's conversation revolved around resolving the delays in new network supply that had plagued the industry for the last few years, and assessing the “new normal.”

Here’s what the TeleGeography trio will dive into in 2025.

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Kristin Carlson

Earlier this week, operators of two communications cables—C-Lion 1 and BCS East-West Interlink—reported faults in the Baltic Sea.

Local internet service seems largely unaffected, but a swirl of sabotage allegations have emerged in the global press.

Without making a ruling on any ongoing investigations, let’s look at the facts.

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Lane Burdette

There's a common theme we encounter here at TeleGeography Explains the Internet.

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Greg Bryan

Our Data Center Research Service estimates that there are 24 metropolitan markets that have more than 1 million square feet of operational data center capacity and four-year CAGR of at least 10%.

Nine of those 24 markets are in Asia and seven are in Europe. Even more extraordinary—four of the Asian markets are in India alone.

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Jon Hjembo

Where are we building data centers? Why? What markets are primed for interconnectivity glory? Which ones are getting left in the dust?

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Greg Bryan

The data center market is in the midst of an unprecedented shift that started—publicly at least—five years ago with the announced moratoria on new development in Singapore and Frankfurt. Those regulatory interventions highlighted the challenges the industry faces in securing sufficient power.

Since then, it turned out that data centers would need much more power than had been realized—just at a time when regulators and community organizations were growing increasingly critical of the sector's existing demand.

Our Data Center Research Service estimates that, as of 2024, colocation operators in the top ten data center markets by MW consume about 13 gigawatts (GW) of power.

That's enough power to generate electricity for roughly 10 million homes—or, in this case, only about 1,000 commercial data centers!

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Jon Hjembo

Starlink, the satellite broadband provider operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX unit, is making rapid inroads in Latin America.

As of November 2024, Starlink’s services are live in 28 countries/overseas territories in Latin America, with more launches planned for 2025.

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Tom Leins

Home to several older but underutilized subsea cables, the Caribbean is a challenging market for operators. With small island nations dependent on subsea, connectivity is vital. As systems age, key stakeholders want new ones, but with difficult business cases, the debate is centering around what end of life means as the old 25-year rule continues to bend.

This is the brief for a panel TeleGeography’s Lilian Lea is moderating next month at Capacity CALA.

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Kristin Carlson

Last week on the pod, we shared what network managers need to know about AI and machine learning. This week, we're back on the AI beat, specifically looking at how it can support corporate network automation.

Per usual, we had a little help. Our guest today is Jamie Pugh, CTO at Globalgig.

Jamie joined the show not only to ponder all things automation but also to discuss enterprise network orchestration in the era of an increasingly complex WAN.

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Greg Bryan

Earlier this year, China Mobile hit one billion mobile subscriptions.

In a country of more than 1.4 billion people, this may not seem like a remarkable milestone. However, the next largest national cellco, Reliance Jio in India, has less than half of this number—around 476 million subscriptions as of mid-2024.

Let’s take a closer look at China Mobile and the other giant operators.

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Pete Bell

Many of the world’s top data center markets face issues such as rising energy costs, connectivity, and in some cases, moratoriums on new data center buildouts.

To help decision-makers navigate these challenges and prepare for the future, we’ve launched the Market Connectivity Score (MCS), a dynamic tool that measures current and potential connectivity and data center market size for 3,000 cities worldwide. 

As of Q4 2024, the MCS ranks Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia as the fastest-growing city for near-future connectivity infrastructure growth. 

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Jon Hjembo

It's 2024. We obviously had to do an AI episode of the pod.

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Greg Bryan

Our IP Networks Research Service—which recently underwent its big annual update—includes an analysis that explores how, what, and where internet backbone providers connect.

Keep reading for a sample of our 2024 provider rankings findings, where we compare different metrics to examine which internet providers have the richest set of connections to other companies.

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Tim Stronge

For our next episode of TeleGeography Explains the Internet, we look to the sky.

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Greg Bryan

The role of business broadband in WAN architecture is evolving. It’s no longer just a backup option—many enterprises now rely on it for core connectivity.

Thanks to the rise of cloud services and SaaS applications, broadband’s flexibility and cost-effectiveness make it a strong contender against legacy services like MPLS and DIA.

We’ve collected data from 170+ countries for our Business Broadband Pricing Database, covering nearly 7,000 broadband plans that range from 1 Mbps to 10 Gbps.

Here’s what we found:

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TeleGeography Pricing Team

TeleGeography research groups bandwidth users into four categories: internet backbone providers, content providers, research and education (R&E), and enterprises and others.

Although R&E is often overshadowed—in favor of content providers especially—it is foundational to the other sectors.

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Jon Hjembo

Telecoms World Asia—the region's premier conference focused entirely on Asian telcos—will be back in action November 19–20, 2024 in Bangkok, Thailand.

And we’ve got a discount code just for our readers.

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Kristin Carlson

Competition between the United States and China continues to be a hot topic.

Take The Economist, which recently published America v China: who controls Asia’s internet?

While this piece did a great job highlighting the impact of geopolitical tensions on telecom infrastructure throughout Asia, my colleague Alan Mauldin and I want to expand on this coverage by offering updated data on two important areas of the story: cloud and cables.

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Patrick Christian

TeleGeography Explains the Internet is back from summer break.

We return a little older, a little wiser, and you can bet that we've done the summer reading. To that end, we're starting this season with a classic TeleGeography Explains deep dive.

The topic? U.S. telecom law! 

Telecom is a regulated industry, and U.S. law holds complexities that impact what happens across the larger ecosystem. I have a lot to learn about telecom policy, so thankfully I'm joined in this explainer by Jeff Long, an attorney in private practice with broad experience in both the data center and telecom industry.

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Greg Bryan

Another year, another African Peering and Interconnection Forum (AfPIF) keynote presentation for Senior Research Manager Patrick Christian.

His 2024 African Network Geography Update explored global network trends, as well as African bandwidth trends, interconnection hub trends, and end-user demand. There was a special focus on Kinshasa, where this year’s AfPIF conference was held.

What are the best-connected hubs in Africa? Where are new and planned submarine cables landing? Is intra-African bandwidth gaining traction?

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Kristin Carlson

Carrier-grade Ethernet is a critical piece of today’s enterprise WAN, and carriers continue to expand their network footprints and make higher capacities available.

TeleGeography’s latest Bandwidth Price Report—drawn from our Network Pricing Database—takes a deep dive into Ethernet’s place in the WAN and analyzes recent pricing trends across geographies and capacities, focusing on Ethernet over MPLS (EoMPLS) and Ethernet over DWDM (EoDWDM).

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Stacey Parker

Trends in the IP transit market generally follow regional trends of the transport market.

And while some have suggested that price erosion may slow as a result of recent inflation and supply chain constraints (as it has in the wavelength market), we have not seen this trend make its way into the IP transit market.

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Brianna Boudreau

We often overlook how critical submarine cable networks are in the advancement of scientific innovation. Their seamless connectivity enables data-intensive collaboration across research and education institutions around the world.

Next week, our Senior Research Manager Jon Hjembo and Ciena’s Brian Lavallée will dive into this topic through a live webinar: Big data. Big science. Big networks.

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Kristin Carlson

We are now moving from sci-fi to reality with the launch of many AI services that are poised to transform industries and reshape our daily lives.

While data centers are expanding rapidly to support AI requirements, there is less clarity on how AI might impact long-haul network infrastructure, especially submarine cables.

This is exactly what I delved into during my keynote at Submarine Networks World 2024.

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Alan Mauldin

Global internet bandwidth rose by 22% in 2024, continuing its slow but steady decline over the past few years. Total international bandwidth now stands at 1,479 Tbps, representing a 4-year CAGR of 25%.

Clearly, the pace of growth has been slowing recently. However, it varies across regions.

New IP Networks research tells us that Africa has once again experienced the most rapid growth of international internet bandwidth, growing at a compound annual rate of 41% between 2020 and 2024.

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Paul Brodsky

If you look at the agenda for ITW Asia—happening December 4-5 in Singapore—you’ll see topics spanning future networks, data infrastructure, subsea Asia, SatCom, and more.

You should also see a familiar face.

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Kristin Carlson

Sylvie LaPerrière, one of TeleGeography's esteemed partners, is a known tech leader in the digital infrastructure community.

You might specifically know of her work as a team lead for Google's subsea cable Equiano along the Western Coast of Africa. Or perhaps you know her as a renowned internet governance advocate and interconnection strategist. 

We're so glad to welcome her decades of expertise to TeleGeography's Preferred Partners program. (This network of telecom professionals is like a telecom A-team ready to apply TG data to new and unique research projects. We're thrilled to take on new opportunities with them.)

Sylvie was kind enough to speak with our team about her take on the industry, advocating for women in telecom, and setting up her own consulting shop. Read our conversation below.

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Rob Schult

Many locations around the world are clamoring to become the next great hub. But before we can identify successful practices to promote digital hubs, we first must decide how to measure that connectivity.

What role do submarine cables play? How about electricity and green power? And government policies ... can those even be quantified?

At Platform Global 2024, TeleGeography VP of Research Tim Stronge took to the stage to tackle these questions.

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Kristin Carlson

Verizon’s shock agreement to acquire ISP giant Frontier Communications in a $20 billion all-cash deal looks set to herald a new era of fixed-mobile convergence in the U.S. telecom market.

The takeover—which is expected to close in 18 months, subject to regulatory approval—follows a series of eye-catching fiber-related announcements involving chief rivals AT&T Communications and T-Mobile US.

Today, we take a look at the respective fiber strategies of the “Big Three” U.S. mobile operators.

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Tom Leins

The first commercial 5G mobile networks were launched in Europe in mid-2019. Roughly one year later, most countries’ main mass-market rollouts were already underway.

The technology continues to grow in popularity as network deployments progress. At the end of June 2024, there were an estimated 190 million 5G subscriptions across Europe, up from around 130 million a year earlier.

In European markets where 5G is available, the technology accounts for an average of 27% of all mobile subscriptions.

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Pete Bell

TeleGeography’s Submarine Cable Map recently hit a new milestone: depicting over 600 cable systems.

As of September 2024, that’s a whopping 532 in-service systems, with another 77 planned.

The number of cable systems we study is constantly increasing. This is due to massive investment in this infrastructure—both along major routes and to small islands—as well as our ongoing efforts to track global systems in more detail. 

The number of in-service systems is greater now than in any other year within the last two decades.

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Lane Burdette

To many people, the concepts of global network infrastructure and bandwidth markets are difficult to grasp. But to those who follow this sector, it's one of the most fundamental building blocks of the global economy.

You’ve likely heard that worldwide bandwidth demand is steadily increasing. A natural follow-up question: why? Who’s generating all of this demand?

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Paul Brodsky

A quiet August? Not for sharing tech and telecom stories around the TeleGeography office.

Take a peek at what we've been reading over the last month, from thought pieces on macroeconomic forces impacting enterprise networks to mulling over subsea energy interconnectors, as one does. 

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Jayne Miller

Grab your headphones, we've got a podcast recommendation.

TeleGeography Senior Manager of Enterprise Research Greg Bryan recently visited MEF's Executives at the Edge podcast. He chatted with host and MEF co-founder Pascal Menezes about the evolving landscape of enterprise networking as SD-WAN becomes the norm and SASE gains traction.

Listen in as the pair assesses how MPLS is declining (yet persisting) and why NaaS is generating buzz.

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Jayne Miller

Undersea geopolitics and digital sovereignty are the buzziest of buzzwords as of late. So it's no surprise that the politics of subsea cables are on the agenda for Submarine Networks World 2024.

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Kristin Carlson

As our summer internship session winds down, TeleGeography welcomes summer pricing intern Zar Adisuryo to the blog! Zar just graduated from Georgetown University with a master's in communication, culture, and technology here in Washington, DC. 

We had the best time with her intern class in the office; our interns are an asset as we compile large, data-intensive research projects throughout the summer. Today, Zar shares what she's learned about broadband in Africa while on the job.

We'll pass the baton to Zar to tell you the rest. ⬇️

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TeleGeography Staff

Capacity Europe 2024—happening October 15-17 in London—will once again bring together the global digital infrastructure universe.

And you can bet that TeleGeography's Rob Schult will be on the scene.

You can catch him on Wednesday, October 16, when he'll join a panel to discuss diversity in submarine cable routes.

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Stacey Parker

For National Intern Day, TeleGeography welcomes summer pricing intern Lizzie Hahn to the blog! Lizzie is one semester away from earning her BA from the George Washington University here in Washington, DC. She’s a pre-law student double-majoring in political science and international business.

We loved having her cohort in the office to assist with large, data-intensive research projects throughout the summer.

Today, Lizzie shares a touch of what she's learned about broadband markets Down Under while on the job. We'll hand it over to her.

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TeleGeography Staff

British telecom regulator Ofcom recently published its Connected Nations report for 2023.

The latest findings indicate that 17.1 million premises—or 57% of the United Kingdom—had access to full-fiber fixed broadband as of September 2023. This is an increase of 15 percentage points—or 4.6 million premises—when compared to the same point in 2022.

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Tom Leins

If you caught our recent interview with Chairman of Platform Markets Group Philip Low, you might have caught wind of Platform Global's next big event coming up September 10-12, 2024 in Antibes.

For the uninitiated, this annual meeting is a must-attend for financiers, private equity investors, deal makers, and owners of digital infrastructure. 

This year, TeleGeography's Vice President of Research Tim Stronge will join prominent corporate executives from around the world for an in-depth conversation about the current market landscape, finance, land, power, connectivity, and future trends.

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TeleGeography Staff

We started collecting our monthly dose of telecom reading recommendations when it occurred to us: this reading list is somewhat despairing.

Earthquake-based cable outages, infrastructure security concerns—a headline that literally includes the words "solar catastrophe." We don't mean to bring the room down with our July picks, but maybe have something lighter queued up for later.

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Jayne Miller

Mexico's digital landscape keeps transforming; it's now the fifth-largest e-commerce market in the world.

This is the backdrop for Mexico Connect 2024.

From Mexico's reliable cloud to the integration of AI, this year's conference is set to explore how Mexico's Digital Economy is on track to become LATAM's digital powerhouse.

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Kristin Carlson

In May 2021, TeleGeography reviewed the early stages of development of 6G mobile technology. Three years on, we turn the spotlight back onto the nascent 6G market to see how things are shaping up.

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Pete Bell

Halfway through 2024, TeleGeography's pricing team has logged lots of frequent flyer miles on the conference circuit. From PTC in January, to Capacity events in March, and ITW later in the spring, we've been collecting as much pricing intel as possible.

As we sift through our notes—specifically our latest ITW findings—we begin to see a clearer picture of what's happening with wavelength pricing around the world.

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Brianna Boudreau

For the last eight years, we've posted submarine cables owned by content providers over here. (Shout-out to the readers who had this one bookmarked.)

When we first published this list in 2017, we had 20 cables listed. Fast-forward to today, and our list has grown to 59—a sizable markup.

With such an uptick in content provider cables to track, we figured it was worth starting a fresh new list for you to bookmark.

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Alan Mauldin

Looking back on June 2024, we can't help but notice the plethora of submarine cable updates and announcements that littered our exchanges. (And you know we're always watching for the latest cable news.)

This month didn't disappoint. Just look at this small sampling of news and notes from around the industry in the last three weeks alone:

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Jayne Miller

As cloud adoption becomes increasingly necessary for multinational enterprises, networks are becoming more complex. They now need to connect not just corporate offices to each other, but to various cloud providers at optimal locations.

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Greg Bryan

With the release of our new WAN Manager Survey intel, it was only a matter of time before we got to the s-words: SD-WAN and SASE. 

Earlier this month, we mentioned both buzzwords in our breakdown of major survey findings. Today I want to spend a little more time with these technologies.

And don't worry, dear readers. There will totally be charts.

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Greg Bryan

Enterprises have embraced hybrid networks.

The expansion of SD-WAN, the benefits of having local internet breakouts for cloud services, and the evolution of network security tools have led more enterprises to employ multiple underlay products.

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Greg Bryan

Mike Constable has logged many hours in digital infrastructure.

He's the mind behind Infra-Analytics Pte Ltd, a strategic consulting and advisory firm. His experience boasts time spent time in leadership and strategic roles, commercial, technical, and project management positions on both the supply and investment side.

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Jayne Miller

With a new normal of hybrid work established, trends in network services are once again changing. But unlike the shifts we saw in 2020, this time trends are fueled by technology and innovation—not huge outside forces like a global pandemic.

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Greg Bryan

We’ve witnessed an unprecedented slowing of bandwidth price erosion globally over the past few years, as network investors, carriers, and customers grappled with delays in new network projects, existing system upgrades, and rising equipment costs.

For the first time, many customers found themselves asking if prices were actually increasing and when price declines would return to typical levels.

While the supply chain constraints and card shortages that spurred this trend have resolved themselves, geopolitical issues have not. As a result, recent price trends vary dramatically by region.

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Brianna Boudreau

If you’re a regular on this blog, you're probably familiar with our submarine cable and cloud infrastructure maps.

But you may not know about the third tool in our interactive map tool belt: the internet exchange map.

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Kristin Carlson

Last week, I joined Ciena’s Brian Lavallée and Colt’s Laurent Taieb for a live webinar all about submarine cable route diversity and sustainability.

For my part, I covered why diversity matters for submarine cables—a very timely topic in light of recent events around the world.

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Alan Mauldin

As May winds down, we’re reflecting on some articles—and broadcasts—that should be on your radar.

Buckle up: this month’s reading list is very submarine cable and data center heavy.

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Kristin Carlson

Starlink, the satellite broadband provider operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, is growing its presence in Africa.

As of May 2024, Starlink’s services are live in eight African countries, with more launches planned for the coming months.

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Pete Bell

Dr. Steve Grubb’s fascination with subsea cable technology began in the 1990s. Thirty years later, now CEO of Grubb Blue Ocean Solutions, Steve spends his time advising cable companies on technical design and vendor selection.

He also lends his expertise as one of TeleGeography's Preferred Partners.

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Jayne Miller

Worldwide bandwidth demand continues to grow at a steady pace.

Annual demand growth has decelerated slowly, but according to new data from TeleGeography’s Transport Networks Research Service, aggregate demand more than tripled between 2019 and 2023 to reach an eye-popping 5 Pbps.

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Alan Mauldin

Submarine cable network bandwidth cannot scale linearly with power and space requirements for economic and sustainability reasons.

To address this reality, the submarine network industry is working tirelessly toward sustainably scaling transoceanic capacity to meet the voracious demand for ever-increasing bandwidth, especially along the trans-Atlantic undersea cable routes.

Wouldn't it be great if someone did a webinar about this?

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Kristin Carlson

Dr. Hervé Février has an engineer's brain. (His colleagues have actually used the term "technical wizard.")

After four decades in optical communications, he saw that the industry was as exciting as ever, brimming with digital infrastructure problems in need of solutions.

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Jayne Miller

Conferences and networking events are a big part of our research cycle.

There’s no better way to keep tabs on what’s happening in telecom than to meet with industry professionals, ask questions, present our data, and learn about what’s on the horizon.

No time for conference hopping?

Here's a collection of resources to catch you up on this year’s travels (so far), brought to you by our team of jet-setting analysts.

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Kristin Carlson

Investment in new submarine cables has surged in recent years. Despite some fluctuations, new cable investment has averaged over $2 billion per year in the past eight years.

With demand continuing to rise at an exponential rate, the value of new submarine cables entering service from 2024-2026 is forecasted to reach over $10 billion.

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Paul Brodsky

Philip Low, Chairman of Platform Markets Group and Managing Director of Headwinds Consultants, has a lot on his plate at the moment.

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Jayne Miller

To many people, the concepts of global network infrastructure and bandwidth markets are difficult to grasp. But to those who follow this sector, it's one of the most fundamental building blocks of the global economy.

If you haven't heard of TeleGeography’s Transport Networks Research Service, it's one of our most popular research subscriptions. In short, this tool assesses the state of the global telecom capacity market—and we just finished updating it with tons of new data and analysis.

So now is the perfect time for us to answer the question: what's fueling the changes we see in the global bandwidth market?

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Jon Hjembo

The enterprise wide area network (WAN) market is in a state of flux, forcing multinational corporations to rethink how they design and source their networks.

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Greg Bryan

It’s been almost a decade since SD-WAN burst onto the scene, and the service is undeniably a critical component of today’s enterprise WAN. 

The core benefits associated with SD-WAN technology are consistent across all provider offerings—reduced cost and network complexity, ease of upgrades and policy changes, increased flexibility and network performance, and increased visibility into application performance.

But a dizzying array of SD-WAN service options still remain in the market.

Providers continue to add new service and security features to distinguish themselves in a crowded marketplace. And this multitude of different service options are reflected in the range of reported prices in the market.

Luckily, there is a light at the end of the tunnel: TeleGeography’s 2024 SD-WAN Vendor Guide.

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Brianna Boudreau

According to TeleGeography’s GlobalComms Database, the global mobile subscription total stood at 8.74 billion at the end of 2023, up 2.0% from 8.57 billion a year earlier.

Population penetration rose from 108% to 109% over the same period, boosted by the popularity of multiple SIM ownership in many markets.

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Pete Bell

Lots of people play the secret cable trivia game hosted on our interactive submarine cable map every month, but it’s been a while since we’ve shared the winning answers.

Time for a pop quiz!

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Kristin Carlson

If traveling to the French Riviera isn’t already on your summer itinerary, we have the perfect excuse to make it so.

Datacloud Global Congress 2024 is happening June 5-6, 2024 in Cannes, France.

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Kristin Carlson

Last month saw the conclusion of the long-running mega-merger between Orange España and Grupo MASMOVIL in Spain.

The EUR19 billion ($20.5 billion) tie-up—first agreed back in July 2022—created a new Spanish market leader that presides over a mobile/fixed broadband subscription base of 37 million. Now known as MasOrange, the 50:50 joint venture looks like a force to be reckoned with.

Today, we take a look at the Spanish deals that came into play in the wake of the merger, and see how they could reshape the telecom landscape.

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Tom Leins

The TeleGeography Submarine Cable Map is our longest-running map project. We started producing submarine cable maps in 1999, and we're still going strong 25 years later.

Just for fun, let’s compare the very first edition—called the Global Communications Cable and Satellite Map—to this year’s Submarine Cable Map.

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Kristin Carlson

There’s a new conference joining the Datacloud event series next month: Datacloud APAC. 

Join us May 6-7, 2024 in Singapore for APAC’d agenda featuring numerous thought leaders from the region’s digital infrastructure community.

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Kristin Carlson

Today, I'm breaking down three fundamental components of cloud networks.

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Patrick Christian

A few weeks ago, TeleGeography headed back to São Paulo to participate in the Capacity Latin America 2024 conference.

There were few dull moments, with the Latin American wholesale connectivity market full of activity. Among the many discussion points, a few key themes are worth mentioning.

Let’s have a look.

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Peter Wood

The geographic coverage of carriers’ enterprise network services varies significantly.

Not every carrier connects to every city in their customers’ networks, and not all services are available everywhere.

When narrowing down the universe of potential suppliers, enterprises must first consider how their geographic requirements overlap a potential service provider’s physical network. They then must determine if the specific data services they require are enabled at each of the service providers’ PoPs.

The WAN Services Coverage analysis—one section of our Cloud and WAN Research—examines carrier network connectivity and service availability from a geographic perspective.

Keep reading for a sneak peek of our latest findings.

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Greg Bryan

Nigeria is home to Africa’s biggest mobile market by some distance, with 217.5 million subscriptions at the end of 2023, up from 209.5 million a year earlier.

The next largest African markets at end-2023 were South Africa with 118.9 million subscriptions, and Egypt with 111.1 million, according to TeleGeography’s GlobalComms Database.

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Pete Bell

Globally, 23 new cloud regions were launched in 2023.

Let’s break that down by region. Which region added the most? And which regions contributed zero?

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Patrick Christian

At TeleGeography, we’ve been working on a project called the Interconnection Index. This tool is designed to answer some questions that we’ve found very difficult to answer and quantify in the past.

What is the next emerging hub in a specific region? How do various hubs compare to each other? Where should I expand in a certain country besides the largest city?

It would be quite challenging to create a one-size-fits-all model that can answer all of these questions appropriately. But we’re still going to try!

We’re going to address this problem with data, and—because we’re geography geeks—maps.

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Tim Stronge

As if three cable faults in the Red Sea weren’t enough of a headache, a series of West African cables were damaged on March 14.

The precise location and cause of all of these faults are not known at this time, but let’s look at what we do know.

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Alan Mauldin

Last week, we wrapped up a five-part podcast special that literally explains how the internet works.

This series describes precisely how data moves around the world, covering the basics of internet, transport networks, data centers, the cloud, and WAN along the way.

At the end of each episode, I thought it would be fun to relate what we talked about to a real world example: the lifecycle of a YouTube video.

To paint the full picture, I've compiled each piece of the story here. Keep reading to find out how a video goes from one camera to millions of screens around the world.

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Greg Bryan

This month, we’ve seen countless headlines swirling about Houthi attacks and submarine cable faults in the Red Sea.

With so much press activity, it can be tough to distinguish fact from rumor. To help you cut through the noise, here are some resources that our team recommends reading/watching.

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Kristin Carlson

When it comes to the nature of exploration, there are typically a number of underlying forces at play, some positive and some negative.

The “pioneering spirit” could be inspired by the excitement of new opportunities, or by the pressure of existing difficulties.

The data center market happens to be dealing with both of those sentiments right now, with several factors driving it to new places.

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Jon Hjembo

Welcome back to TeleGeography Explains the Internet. We've reached the finale of our five-part series that makes good on our name, literally explaining the ins and outs of the interwebs.

Over the past five weeks, we've endeavored to explain precisely how data moves around the world, covering the basics of internet, transport networks, data centers, and the cloud along the way.

Today we answer the lingering question: What is a WAN?

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Greg Bryan

We recently wrote about how Houthi attacks in the Red Sea are causing headaches for the undersea cable industry.

Since then, the industry has suffered three cable faults in the region.

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Tim Stronge

Welcome back to our five-part podcast special that seeks to demystify the internet. 

Our last episode focused on data centers, but we didn’t get into what happens on the rows and rows of servers you would find in those facilities.

So today we're explaining the cloud.

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Greg Bryan

If you liked last week's Submarine Cable Map reveal, you'll be stoked to hear that we've got another new map up our sleeve.

Meet the 2024 Africa Telecommunications Map.

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Kristin Carlson

If you've read over our Submarine Cable Frequently Asked Questions, you know that cable faults are common. On average, there are over 100 each year.

Of course, as a society heavily dependent on these cables, we've gotten quite good at repairing them.

But what was the repair process like a few decades ago? How were we fixing cables back in the era of the Walkman?

Time for a trip down memory lane.

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Kristin Carlson

We're back at it with episode three of our five-part podcast special that explains the nuts and bolts of the internet.

You've come to the right place if you're looking to understand how all of those cat videos travel from the source to your phone. 

We explained in episode two how the internet is made of transport networks to carry data over (mostly) fiber optic wires distributed around the world. And in the episode before that, we discussed how the internet is a network of networks operated by thousands of mostly private companies.

But we haven’t yet covered exactly how and where those networks meet and exchange traffic with each other and access their destinations.

So today, it's data center time.

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Greg Bryan

Meet the latest addition to our map repertoire, the 2024 Submarine Cable Map.

Sponsored by Telecom Egypt, this handsome new edition explores global connectivity from the sea to the cloud, depicting 559 cable systems and 1,636 landings that are currently active or under construction.

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Kristin Carlson

Welcome back to our five-part podcast special that literally explains how the internet you know and love works.

Last week we covered the most basic question: what is the internet?

Today, we tunnel deeper, exploring the physical transport networks behind this seemingly invisible, omnipresent information superhighway.

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Greg Bryan

At this year’s Pacific Telecommunications Council conference, I spent some time talking through TeleGeography’s latest pricing research findings and tackling the most common questions we've received over the past year.

In case you missed it, here's a recap of my Taylor Swift-themed presentation: Global Pricing Trends in a New Era.

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Brianna Boudreau

If you've caught TeleGeography's podcast, you'll know that we endeavor to explain the business behind human connection every week. We've chatted about Wi-Fi, WAN, and everything in between. 

We've audaciously called our show TeleGeography Explains the Internet, but we've never properly explained how the internet works and how bits get pushed around the globe. Until now.

That's right. We decided it was time to, quite literally, explain the internet.

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Greg Bryan

With an estimated 750 million active subscriptions at the end of September 2023, China has the world’s largest 5G mobile market by far.

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Pete Bell

If you haven't already marked your calendar for Capacity LATAM 2024, be sure to block off March 12-13.

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Kristin Carlson

With 2024 now well and truly underway, we take a look at some of the top trends that GlobalComms subscribers can expect to see a lot more of this year.

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Tom Leins

“Enterprises have shifted connectivity to the internet, mostly with DIA. This changes the security environment away from private MPLS to the best-efforts public internet.”

Last week, Senior Manager of Enterprise Research Greg Bryan joined Ciena's Brian Lavallée for a live webinar all about submarine cables and security.

For his part, Greg described how the enterprise network has shifted in the last few years, how carriers and enterprises have responded to these changes, and why geography matters in network security.

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Kristin Carlson

On TeleGeography Explains the Internet, we often focus on the long-haul, zeroing in on the network portion of telecoms. Today, with the help of Tiago Rodrigues, President and CEO of the Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA), we’re switching things up a bit.

Drawing upon his vast expertise in the Wi-Fi space, Tiago steps into the hot seat to outline the key issues in the wireless LAN.

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Greg Bryan

The Red Sea is a global hot spot at the moment due to repeated attacks by Yemeni Houthi rebels against commercial shipping vessels.

While this inlet is a strategic location for global shipping, it also plays a vital role in global communications networks.

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Alan Mauldin

Another lap around the sun, a new TeleGeography State of the Network Report—a tradition we’ve kept since 2017.

No seven-year itch for us, though; we’re just getting started. As the world of telecommunications continues to turn, each edition brings even more to report on than the last.

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Kristin Carlson

Note: Our January promotion has ended, but you can still win a free map!
Click here to answer this month’s trivia question.

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Kristin Carlson

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 carriers terminated approximately 257 billion minutes of traffic in 2022, down 5% from 2021. Wholesale traffic declined at an average rate of 1% per year over the past ten years, compared to a -2% CAGR for overall traffic. Wholesale carriers terminated nearly three-fourths (72%) of international traffic in 2022, up from 70% the year before.

Traffic to mobile phones in emerging markets has spurred expansion in wholesalers' share of the overall market. In 2022, wholesale carriers terminated over 87% of traffic to Sub-Saharan Africa and South America. In contrast, wholesale carriers terminated only 56% of traffic to Western Europe.

Wholesale revenues have changed only marginally from ten years ago. But let’s take a moment to look under the hood.

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Patrick Christian

By any measure, the global bandwidth market is thriving. International bandwidth demand has nearly doubled from 2020 to 2022, and has now reached 3.8 Pbps.

Meanwhile, the lit capacity on major submarine cable routes continues to soar, keeping pace with demand.

How? Is the network getting faster?

Not quite. Think bigger highway, not faster cars.

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Jon Hjembo

The year 2014 represents the peak for international voice traffic. International call minutes declined the following year, for the first time since the Great Depression—and it's been downhill ever since.

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Paul Brodsky

We're kicking off 2024 with a free webinar, and it's all about submarine cable security.

Join TeleGeography’s Greg Bryan and Ciena's Brian Lavallée on Wednesday, January 17 at 11:00 a.m. ET right from your desk, or couch, or favorite café.

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Kristin Carlson

If you caught Research Director Alan Mauldin’s Submarine Networks World presentation this year, then you know how well-versed he is in submarine cable geopolitics (and in cable knowledge in general).

So you shouldn’t be surprised to see Alan sharing his expertise throughout ABC News’ exciting new submarine cable documentary, The Cloud Under the Sea.

This hour-long program “uncovers the shadowy world of telecommunication sea cables.” Watch it below.

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Kristin Carlson

French telco group Iliad has submitted a proposal to UK-based Vodafone Group regarding the potential merger of their respective operations in Italy.

If successful, the merger will have a big impact on the Italian mobile market, reducing it from five players to four, while also combining the fixed broadband operations of the two companies.

The deal is by no means guaranteed to go through, however. Even if Vodafone’s response is positive, regulatory authorities must then study its effects on competition.

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Pete Bell

As another eventful year draws to a close, we’re looking back at the telecom stories that captured our readers’ attention throughout 2023.

With 5G rollouts, satellite broadband, SIM card registration and mega-mergers all on the agenda, the CommsUpdate team left no stone unturned in their quest to bring you the biggest daily news stories from around the world.

Read on for our most popular stories of 2023.

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Tom Leins

The pressures of supply chain disruptions, electricity price volatility, and government intervention are impacting prices in the global colocation market.

As we continue to move through 2023, here are a couple of trends to keep an eye on.

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Jon Hjembo

As 2023 comes to a close, we’re one step closer to PTC ’24—and TeleGeography's annual workshop on all things telecom.

Next month, Brianna Boudreau, Jon Hjembo, and Tim Stronge will return to the PTC stage to share insight on the last year in pricing, interconnection, submarine cables, bandwidth, and more.

After chronicling the impact of global supply chain disruptions in our 2023 session, it’s time to assess whether we’re back to normal, and what the new normal is.

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Kristin Carlson

If you’ve checked out our International Voice Report, you probably noticed that the data carefully distinguishes between retail and wholesale traffic, and between wholesale and direct traffic.

What's the difference?

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Paul Brodsky

By our 2023 estimates, the Washington metropolitan area—or more specifically Northern Virginia (NoVA)—dominates as the world's largest data center market.

With more than 22 million square feet of operational capacity, NoVA is 30% larger than the next-biggest data center hub, Tokyo.

What else does the most recent update to our Data Center Research Service tell us?

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Jon Hjembo

With Capacity Middle East just two months away, it's time to get excited for the region's leading digital infrastructure conference.

The 2024 agenda is poised to tackle major themes like market developments, network transformation, subsea cables, data centers, AI and future tech, and more.

It’s all happening February 6-8, 2024 in Dubai—and we've got a discount code to share.

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Kristin Carlson

Recently, we’ve been closely monitoring the intensifying pressures of insatiable demand and supply constraints in key data center markets.

Supply constraints have come in the form of both short-term and long-term challenges.

In the short term, supply chain disruptions have hindered development timelines. On the long-term side, regulators and utility providers have begun taking a hard look at the data center sector and how to grow it sustainably going forward. In some cases, these entities have severely disrupted development during the interim period.

None of these challenges have been resolved. And as we move through 2023, another major disruptive component has been added to the mix—the accelerated growth of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI).

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Jon Hjembo

Wouldn't it be great to be fully retired before your 30th birthday?

Because they are engineered with a minimum design life of 25 years, it's common for the submarine cables that keep our world connected to experience this luxury.

Let’s talk about why, and what happens to cables after they reach retirement age.

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Alan Mauldin

Brazil’s multi-band 5G spectrum auction drew to a close in November 2021, generating total commitments of BRL47.2 billion ($8.5 billion).

The auction process attracted bids from a mixture of major players like Telefonica Brasil (Vivo), Claro Brasil, and TIM Brasil, established regional players such as Algar Telecom and Sercomtel, and a number of lesser-known participants.

Two years later, we examine the respective progress of Brazil’s 5G licensees. 

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Tom Leins

To spread some cheer and celebrate the beginning of the holiday season, we’re dubbing this month’s reading list the “good news edition.”

Here are three feel-good telecom headlines that you can be thankful for while waiting in line for those Black Friday deals.

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Kristin Carlson

I'm back with a new episode of TeleGeography Explains the Internet.

In the hot seat this time: Nokia's Paul Unbehagen. Paul has a deep history in the networking world, so he approaches his role at Nokia—NE Americas CTO—from the perspective of a network engineer.

Although our main topics this week are enterprise cloud and right-sizing cloud utilization, we use those as a springboard into many topics circling the state of the network in 2023.

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Greg Bryan

Until recently, Ethiopia was one of the few telecom markets in the world that was still a monopoly, with no competition to state-owned firm Ethio Telecom.

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Pete Bell

The age of generative AI is certainly exciting. The ability to quickly access answers to complex questions is poised to revolutionize the world. However, with great power comes great responsibility.  

When using these tools, it’s important to be mindful of some of the risks. Deep fakes are a growing concern for society at large and may have found their way to market research.

As we mentioned earlier this year, when it comes to submarine cable facts, AI may get some stuff right, but not everything.

In fact, you may be wondering, “does this mean there’s no need to subscribe to TeleGeography research anymore?” After all, can’t you just ask your favorite AI tool—whether it’s ChatGPT, Bard, etc.—to provide you with TeleGeography data?

I thought I’d ask Bard to show me some TeleGeography data. Are the results real or deep fakes? 

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Alan Mauldin

The Latin American Satellite Congress held in Rio de Janeiro at the end of September provided a great opportunity to engage with some of the largest satellite communication companies in the world.

Looking back, there was one common theme that stood out: collaboration.

As we at TeleGeography have noted many times, the vast majority of global connectivity passes through submarine cables. But satellite networks are growing ever more important, both as complements to terrestrial systems and as last resorts for where it is hard (or expensive) to lay fiber.

For enterprises, that means a hybrid Wide Area Network (WAN) combining satellite and terrestrial connectivity is increasingly relevant.

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Peter Wood

This week on TeleGeography Explains the Internet, we welcome SmartCIC CEO Toby Forman to the show.

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Greg Bryan

If Capacity Asia 2023 isn’t on your conference radar yet, it should be.

This year's event is happening December 12-13 in Singapore, and we've got a handy discount code just for our readers.

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Kristin Carlson

Need a last-minute idea for a Halloween costume contest? Try dressing up as space junk.

If anyone asks why your costume is so scary, tell them that according to NASA, “as of January 2022, the amount of material orbiting the Earth exceeded 9,000 metric tons.”

That’s over 19 million pounds of orbital debris—and a massive problem. However, the FCC has begun cracking down on the issue, recently issuing its first fine on the matter.

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Kristin Carlson

Today’s TeleGeography Explains the Internet guest comes to the security world with a deep background in cloud and networks.

Joe DePalo is Chief Platform Officer at Netskope, and the ideal person to help us understand how and why location matters in network security.

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Greg Bryan

The Capacity CALA 2023 schedule has dropped, and it's loaded with all things Caribbean and Latin American connectivity.

Keep reading to get the deets—including a registration discount code just for our readers.

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Kristin Carlson

Following the sale of its local operations on October 9, 2023, Amsterdam-based multinational telecom group VEON has completed its exit from Russia.

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Pete Bell

While artificial intelligence (AI) has been the most hyped demand driver in recent years, its impact on international internet capacity is not entirely clear.

A large amount of AI-driven demand is likely to be carried over the private networks of Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta. Microsoft's infrastructure is also supporting OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.

Here are some other factors that will shape how the global internet develops in the coming years.

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Paul Brodsky

Why am I getting ads for this toothpaste? How could my devices possibly know I'm in the market for a new tube? Did they hear me mutter something about running low? Do they know I jotted it down on our grocery list?

Today on TeleGeography Explains the Internet, we're asking the big questions about mobile advertising. 

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Greg Bryan

When Senior Research Manager Patrick Christian returned to the African Peering and Interconnection Forum this year, he did not come empty-handed.

Tucked into his suitcase—or, more accurately, safely stored in the cloud—was Patrick’s keynote presentation, a brand new African Network Geography Update.

Watch the recording below to explore global network trends, African bandwidth trends, localized content growth, and end-user demand.

You’ll also hear a bit about 2Africa and what we can expect when the cable system comes online.

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Kristin Carlson

Three years after the COVID-19 pandemic struck, the internet seems to have achieved a state of normalcy.

This can be seen across regions of the world. With the initial rapid traffic growth due to COVID-19 continuing to wane in 2023, many global networks appear to have started to return to more typical rates of utilization.

Let’s look at the numbers.

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Paul Brodsky

In a recent interview with Asian Telecom, I was asked to shed light on Asia’s prominence in global cloud services. More specifically, why are data centers and cloud services expanding so rapidly in Asia?

As population density increases, there is a natural surge in data consumption, like cloud services. So it makes sense that Asia—home to 60% of the world’s population—has a growing demand for data centers.

But that's not the only catalyst here, and there are numerous advantages to having data centers clustered across Asia.

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Marvin Tan

Live from Ohio, it's Tuesday night. 

Yup. We're sneaking in a LIVE episode of TeleGeography Explains the Internet this week. 

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Greg Bryan

Update: This event has been cancelled. More details here.

Next month, Senior Research Manager Greg Bryan will be taking part in a panel discussion at Capacity's Connected Enterprise in Chicago.

This panel, titled Reviewing the Connectivity Landscape, will cover a handful of big questions.

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Kristin Carlson

Last week, Research Director Alan Mauldin unveiled yet another show-stopping presentation at Submarine Networks World.

This time around, Alan dove into the “Subsea Cold War” between China and the U.S. to assess its impact on the submarine cable industry.

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Kristin Carlson

Tuesday is podcast day here at TeleGeography. And this time around we welcome William Collins, Principal Cloud Architect at Alkira.

If the subject of this blog didn't totally give it away, today's episode is focused on the cloud. I asked William to talk us through the history of enterprise cloud and highlight a few of the bigger issues in enterprise cloud networking today. His answers might surprise you.

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Greg Bryan

Taylor Swift and TeleGeography have something in common—we were both born in 1989. And much like everyone’s favorite pop star, we are taking a tour through the ages (of our maps, that is).

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Kristin Carlson

Another month, another list of interesting telecom reads (and listens).

Here are a few things you ought to have on your radar, including a podcast episode about submarine cable geopolitics, a handsome take on our Submarine Cable Map, a new cloud data center presentation, and more.

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Kristin Carlson

The newest member of the TeleGeography Explains the Internet club is telecom industry veteran Mark Daley, Epsilon Telecommunications Director of Digital Strategy and Business Development.

After spending nearly a decade directly involved with SDN and NaaS at Epsilon Telecommunications, Mark is the perfect guest to help me talk through how NaaS is unfolding in the market.

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Greg Bryan

After a tumultuous 2020, in which the COVID-19 pandemic caused internet traffic patterns to shift and volumes to surge, network operators have returned to the business of adding bandwidth and engineering their traffic in a more measured manner.

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Paul Brodsky

Luis Fiallo has been in the telecom industry for over 25 years. And for the majority of that time, he has been at China Telecom Americas, witnessing the many changes happening in the Latin American telecom market firsthand.

After years of helping to drive CTA's growth in the region, Luis—now Vice President—has many valuable insights to share with TeleGeography Explains the Internet.

Since this episode largely focuses on Latin American networks and cloud developments, I also invited my colleague Peter Wood, TeleGeography’s Senior Analyst covering Latin America.

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Greg Bryan

Last week, I presented the latest TeleGeography data on Asian cloud data centers through a live webinar with Ciena.

Let's talk through the first section of my presentation, which maps out the region’s current cloud data center and cloud service provider landscape.

I'll also share a link to download my slides and watch a recording of the discussion.

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Patrick Christian

We recently surveyed a mixture of carriers and MSPs, SD-WAN vendors, and pure-play security vendors about their network security offerings in order to analyze what these services are and how they are being offered.

In this analysis, we also detail the available pricing models across services.

Here's an excerpt.

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Greg Bryan

In both 2021 and 2022, MEF CTO Pascal Menezes joined us on TeleGeography Explains the Internet to talk through the work MEF is doing on standardizing the enterprise network.

This season, we welcome a new face from the same team, Stan Hubbard, Principal Analyst at MEF.

Stan recently authored a State of the Industry Report for MEF, so I wanted to have him on to discuss his findings and see where the telecom industry is at with adopting new technologies.

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Greg Bryan

After a three-year dip, the pace of cloud region expansion is accelerating, with close to 50 planned regions in 2023 and beyond. Asia is the global leader with the most cloud data centers—more than the U.S. and Europe combined—with key infrastructure projects to watch.

Join TeleGeography Senior Research Manager Patrick Christian and Ciena's Brian Lavallée on Tuesday, September 12 at 11:00 a.m. ET for a live discussion covering the latest data on Asian cloud data centers.

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Kristin Carlson

To write our 2023 Network Security Analysis, we asked a mixture of carriers and MSPs, SD-WAN vendors, and pure-play security vendors to tell us about their network security offerings.

The vast majority of our survey respondents were from carriers/MSPs, meaning they often source the security infrastructure and software from pure-play security vendors rather than developing their own security services.

Most providers used more than one security channel partner to offer their services. 

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Mei Harrison

Season 5 of TeleGeography Explains the Internet is here, and we're kicking things off with Dennis Thankachan, Co-Founder and CEO at Lightyear.

Because Dennis is in the unique position of being able to see how enterprises are sourcing networks, I was excited to talk to him about some key WAN trends he has seen recently.

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Greg Bryan

Our Cloud and WAN Research Service just unveiled a fourth WAN analysis module, and it's all about network security.

To write this analysis, we asked a mixture of carriers and MSPs, SD-WAN vendors, and pure-play security vendors to tell us about their network security offerings.

Here's a look at what these services are and how they are being offered.

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Greg Bryan

It's always exciting to see submarine cable conversations happening in industries outside of telecom.

TeleGeography Research Analyst Lane Burdette was recently invited to the Institutional Real Estate, Inc. Podcast to talk about subsea cable infrastructure, the companies involved, investment opportunities, and the future of the industry.

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Kristin Carlson

The geographic coverage of carriers’ enterprise network services varies significantly. Not every carrier connects to every city in their customers’ networks, and not all services are available everywhere.

When narrowing down the universe of potential suppliers, enterprises must first consider how their geographic requirements overlap a potential service provider’s physical network. They then must determine if the specific data services they require are enabled at each of the service providers’ PoPs.

TeleGeography's WAN Services Coverage analysis—part of our Cloud and WAN Research Service—examines carrier network connectivity and service availability from a geographic perspective.

Here's a snippet of that analysis, followed by some handy definitions.

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Paul Brodsky

Earlier this month, South African ISP Vumatel announced that its fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) infrastructure now passes two million homes. One million of these homes are in traditionally underserved areas, such as townships.

This network footprint means that Vumatel now presides over a more substantial FTTH network than Telkom South Africa’s Openserve unit.

Fiber ISPs are very much on the rise in South Africa, with multiple players gaining traction with their regional rollouts.

Unusually, the majority of these operators use an open access business model, allowing dozens of smaller companies to market and resell fiber connectivity.

Today, we take a look at the main players driving fiber growth in South Africa.

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Tom Leins

Cloud services have become a critical component of many enterprises' data management. And how enterprises reach the cloud service providers' data centers has become an important issue.

Traditionally, the plain old internet sufficed. But there's more than one way to skin a cat.

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Patrick Christian

United Arab Emirates (UAE) telco e&—formerly known as Etisalat Group—is slowly but surely building a presence in Europe.

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Pete Bell

ICYMI, last week we kicked off our Know Before You Go broadcast series with a behind-the-scenes look at Datacloud USA 2023.

TeleGeography Principal Analyst Erik Kreifeldt joined the live stream to prepare attendees for the conversations they can expect at the conference.

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Kristin Carlson

In case you missed it, we’re looking back at some previous hypothetical network scenarios to see how the cost of network ownership can change over time.

In last week’s blog, Senior Research Manager Brianna Boudreau explored our first tiered scenario, which takes a conservative approach to integrating internet services and SD-WAN into the WAN.

If you haven’t read it yet, I encourage you to start there. Brianna’s post also provides important context about our hypothetical network and baseline dual MPLS network.

For Part 2 of this analysis, I'll map out a second, less conservative tiered approach, then switch gears to our Remote Hybrid Network.

Let’s dive in.

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Rob Schult

Enterprise customers have embraced hybrid networks that employ multiple underlay technologies combined with an SD-WAN overlay. And for good reason.

Many SaaS applications and cloud services have been optimized to work over local internet connections rather than through central internet breakouts. The integration of an SD-WAN overlay addresses many of the concerns about network performance and security that come along with incorporating internet into the WAN.

And as we detailed in our recent blog series, the DIA and broadband services included in these hybrid networks are often cheaper than MPLS–sometimes considerably so. This allows WAN managers to reduce network spend or increase their capacity while staying within the same budget.

But even after enterprise customers have undergone a network transformation, it is still imperative for them to keep tabs on the market and assess what their network should cost. Particularly if their network contract includes a benchmarking clause.

With the latest update of our enterprise port pricing, we looked back at some previous hypothetical network scenarios to see how the cost of network ownership can change over time.

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Brianna Boudreau

Love attending conferences but hate not knowing what to expect?

Enter Know Before You Go, an all-new broadcast series—powered by JSA and TeleGeography—that prepares viewers for the conversations, topics, and trends discussed at the top digital infrastructure industry conferences around the world.

With conference season right around the corner, we’re kicking things off this Thursday. Our first broadcast will be all about Datacloud USA 2023, and you're invited.

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Kristin Carlson

Last year, New York City removed its last public payphone. This action marked the end of an era, but a new one has already unfolded.

Our July list of recommended reads touches on the latest iteration of LinkNYC, submarine cables, a fresh TeleGeography presentation, and … butter.

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Kristin Carlson

Earlier this month, Brazilian regional ISPs Vero Internet and AmericaNet agreed to merge their respective operations.

Vero currently ranks as the seventh-largest ISP in Brazil; AmericaNet is eleventh. The enlarged entity will jump to fifth place in the fixed broadband market.

The deal seems highly likely to spark further consolidation. Regional fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) players have flourished in recent years, with a number of fast-growing ISPs snapping up operations in and around their regional strongholds.

As of May 2023 (most recent official data), 16 Brazilian ISPs served more than 250,000 subscriptions, suggesting the time is right for a sustained period of M&A activity.

Let’s take a look at the companies that have been driving M&A in Brazil in recent years.

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Tom Leins

Earlier this week, I joined Ciena and Telstra for a live webinar highlighting Asia-Pacific market drivers, trends, and new cable builds.

During my session, which focused on Trans-Pacific submarine cable trends, content providers came up quite a bit.

These companies prioritize the need to link their data centers and major interconnection points. As such, they often deploy massive amounts of capacity on core routes.

The Trans-Pacific and Intra-Asia routes are two great examples.

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Marvin Tan

CommsUpdate—our free daily summary of major telecom news around the world—has been jam-packed with red-hot headlines this year.

Now that we're more than halfway through 2023, let's look back at our most popular stories of the year. From Starlink expansion to a legal battle in South Sudan, these five stories have garnered the most attention since January.

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Kristin Carlson

Earlier this month, international telecom group Telefonica entered into its fourth Latin American fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) joint venture (JV).

The deal was sealed in Peru after Telefonica agreed to terms with investment firm KKR and Peruvian telco Entel.

This new fiber-based JV follows earlier agreements in Brazil, Chile, and Colombia. Let’s take a closer look at Telefonica’s strategy and examine the scope of the networks in question.

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Tom Leins

Corporate traffic patterns continue to change. And static, single technology transport networks designed to secure internal corporate communications no longer meet network requirements.

Today they are being replaced by dynamic, hybrid, application-aware networks.

These new WANs are intelligent at the edge. They are able to categorize data and route it over a variety of transport types based on policy or application performance requirements. And they ensure a high-quality, secure experience to users regardless of their physical location, access device, or application location.

One innovation assisting WAN managers in deploying hybrid networks—while also ensuring the security and performance of their network—is SD-WAN.

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Brianna Boudreau

There are a lot of acronyms used in the telecommunications space, and it can be tough to keep them straight.

Thanks to TeleGeography's new acronym cheatsheet, you don't have to.

Mixing up FTTC, FTTN, and FTTP, for example? NBD, we've got you covered.

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Kristin Carlson

Almost a year ago, I shared a presentation on trans-Pacific submarine network opportunities in a live webinar with Ciena and Hawaiki.

A lot has changed since then, and I'm excited to share a new deck of fresh TeleGeography data on Tuesday, July 18 at 11:00 a.m. ET.

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Marvin Tan

If you're a regular here on the TeleGeography blog, you've likely noticed that we round out each month with a list of telecom reading recommendations.

This month, we have more of a watching recommendation. That's because the recording of Research Director Alan Mauldin’s Namex Annual Meeting 2023 presentation—focused on Italy's Role in Global Network Expansion—is now available.

Alan first sets the stage with a breakdown of international bandwidth demand growth by region. Between 2018 and 2022, Europe grew at a compounded annual rate of about 41%.

This number implies that every two years, there is a complete doubling of all the bandwidth that links the countries within Europe, and other countries into Europe.

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Kristin Carlson

In the last few years, Huawei, ZTE, and other Chinese equipment suppliers have come under increasing scrutiny due to alleged links with the Beijing government, raising serious security concerns for Western powers.

Following the U.S. government's ban on Chinese 5G technology, China-based vendors now face problems elsewhere.

The European Union (EU) is considering an outright ban of Chinese equipment across Europe’s 5G networks.

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Pete Bell

Connectivity by satellite is not new, but expanding networks via low earth orbit (LEO) is a recent phenomenon receiving lots of investment.

As interest in LEO connectivity has grown, the number of companies looking to establish themselves in the market has also gone up. However, in recent conversations with satellite industry leaders, we’ve heard speculation that the market may have reached a saturation point.

That means mergers, acquisitions, and market consolidation are likely to occur. In fact, some of that has already begun to unfold.

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Peter Wood

In sharp contrast to other regions, only a handful of Latin American telecom markets have seen 5G launch activity to date, with notable examples including the likes of Brazil and Chile.

However, a number of eagerly awaited 5G spectrum auctions are expected to take place in the region in the coming months.

Today we take a closer look at the LatAm markets where we can expect to witness 5G auction activity before the end of the year. 

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Tom Leins

If you're not familiar with TeleGeography’s Cloud Infrastructure Map—a free tool that tracks cloud data centers and on-ramps both built and planned—now is a great time to get acquainted.

Why, you ask? When our team updated the Cloud and WAN Research Service for 2023, the Cloud Infrastructure Map also got a refresh.

Keep reading to get the lowdown on our latest version and why you ought to be using it.

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Patrick Christian

In 2019, my colleague Alan Mauldin and I busted the myth that the submarine cable industry’s current practices would sustain our future capacity requirements. 

Four years later, we revisited the same question during our telecom mythbusting session at SubOptic 2023.

Was the verdict the same?

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Tim Stronge

Last month, the TeleGeography team joined scores of ICT infrastructure professionals in National Harbor, Maryland for International Telecommunications Week.

One of the many topics discussed was price erosion in Latin America. The main trend likely comes as no surprise: prices keep falling. But there is nuance to how price erosion is occurring in different markets.

Let’s explore the context in more detail.

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Peter Wood

Let’s talk about geopolitical conflict between China and the U.S. and how it’s affecting the network. Has it caused the two countries to disconnect?

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Tim Stronge

Over the past few weeks, we've been revisiting the latest episodes of TeleGeography Explains the Internet with a Season 4 recap.

To conclude the series, here are six clips from the podcast—each under three minutes—that we think will teach you something interesting. First up: how accurate is Epcot's history of communications?

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Kristin Carlson

What has the TeleGeography team been reading lately?

First up on our list: a Foreign Policy piece explaining why new submarine cables are not connecting the U.S. and China.

We also pulled some stories that have been making the rounds in our Slack channels, from a very special birthday to a unique liquidation sale.

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Kristin Carlson

Although TeleGeography Explains the Internet explores all areas of the global business of connectivity, there are some hot topics that demand extra attention.

Submarine cables and artificial intelligence are two examples. Both are heavily covered in the press and on everyone's minds right now—including our podcast guests.

Here are some highlights pulled from Season 4. Listen as experts weigh in on utilizing subsea cables as seismic monitoring networks, using AI in network monitoring, and more.

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Kristin Carlson

At SubOptic 2023, my colleague Tim Stronge and I brought back the Telecom Mythbusters to test a new series of myths.

I already covered my first two myths from our presentation: the cable lifespan myth and the 99% myth.

My third and final myth—the exponential growth myth—is based upon a quote that I found.

“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” –Albert Allen Bartlett

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Alan Mauldin

As we explored the global business of connectivity throughout Season 4 of TeleGeography Explains the Internet, network security was a recurring theme.

Here’s what five experts—including AT&T’s Software Defined Cybersecurity Evangelist, Arelion’s Chief Evangelist, Aryaka’s Chief Product Officer, and two TeleGeography Senior Research Managers—want you to know.

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Kristin Carlson

A long-running telecom saga came to an end last month with the conclusion of the C$25 billion ($18.4 billion) merger between Canadian operators Rogers Communications and Shaw Communications.

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Pete Bell

In honor of the upcoming fifth season of TeleGeography Explains the Internet, we’re running you through the highlights of all 25 episodes from Season 4, five at a time.

Revisit part one to watch clips on energy conservation in the fiber optic space, the resurgence of satellite, the changing nature of technology, and more.

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Kristin Carlson

“Submarine cables account for over 99% of intercontinental data traffic” is regularly quoted in the press with no source given.

It’s time for some fact-checking.

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Alan Mauldin

We just wrapped up the fourth season of our podcast, TeleGeography Explains the Internet.

After three seasons focused primarily on the WAN, Senior Manager/Podcast Host Greg Bryan spent the last few months more broadly exploring the global business of connectivity with a wide range of guests.

A lot of ground was covered. In fact, if you were to binge the whole season at once, it would take around 20 hours to listen through all 25 episodes.

While that would be very impressive, we've made a highlight reel with bite-sized clips to help you catch up. Stay tuned as we work our way through the season, five episodes at a time.

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Kristin Carlson

This month’s list of telecom reading recs starts off with a new map that you may have seen circulating on social media.

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Kristin Carlson

This week, Season 4 of TeleGeography Explains the Internet ends on a high note with Junior Research Analyst Mei Harrison’s podcast debut.

As one half of our dynamic enterprise duo, Mei is the perfect person to help me talk through results from our recently published WAN Manager Survey.

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Greg Bryan

“The lifespan of a submarine cable is 25 years.” We’ve all heard that, right?

Is this statement really a fact—or is it fiction? Let’s find out.

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Alan Mauldin

How are submarine cables impacted by tectonic shifts beneath the seafloor?

This week's guests on TeleGeography Explains the Internet are well-positioned to tell us. They join us from the UK’s National Oceanography Centre: Isobel Yeo, Researcher in Geology and Volcanology, and Michael Clare, Principal Researcher of Ocean BioGeoscience and Marine Environmental Adviser to the International Cable Protection Committee. 

Mike and Izzy are geologists specializing in the seafloor, so their research has become vital for the submarine cable community.

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Greg Bryan

Earlier this year, it was revealed that Denis O’Brien—the Irish businessman who founded international telecom group Digicel in 2001—could lose up to 90% of the company to U.S.-based investment firms.

These firms are poised to seize control of the business in exchange for writing off up to $1.8 billion of Digicel’s debt.

The revelation that O’Brien could lose his empire follows a tumultuous period for Digicel. Today we take a look at the rise and fall of a Caribbean communications kingpin.

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Tom Leins

While our interactive submarine cable map is updated on a rolling basis, printed editions are unveiled annually. Each edition has a different theme, and our team always tries to out-do last year’s release.

Can you guess what inspired our latest design?

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Kristin Carlson

I think this is a milestone. This might be the first episode of TeleGeography Explains the Internet where we talk about 6G.

First, let me rewind. Our guest today is Dario Betti, CEO of the Mobile Ecosystem Forum.

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Greg Bryan

It's regularly cited in the press that $10 trillion of financial transactions flow over submarine cables every day. But is it true?

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Tim Stronge

Today’s episode of TeleGeography Explains the Internet is about artificial intelligence. And for that we welcome Kannan Kothandaraman, Co-Founder and CEO at Selector AI.

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Greg Bryan

With a fresh map release, an updated e-book, a new presentation deck and more, March has been madness for TeleGeography.

Let's recap some stuff you might have missed.

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Kristin Carlson

As cloud adoption becomes increasingly necessary for multinational enterprises, backend networks are becoming more complex.

The introduction of X-as-a-Service products and the need for multi-cloud environments have pushed WAN managers to make changes to their current ecosystems and adopt new technologies.

Let's look at how network professionals are integrating the cloud and Networking-as-a-Service (NaaS) into their enterprise networks.

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Greg Bryan

I've always known Aryaka Networks as service provider with a different approach to enterprise networks—they don’t neatly fit into categories like facilities-based carrier or managed service provider.

When Aryaka’s Chief Product Officer Renuka Nadkarni agreed to join me on TeleGeography Explains the Internet, I quickly had a list of questions mapped about their place in the WAN landscape.

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Greg Bryan

According to the latest data from TeleGeography’s GlobalComms Database Service, as of March 2023, 18 countries in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region are served by commercial 5G services.

This includes eight in the Middle East and 10 in Africa.

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Pete Bell

SubOptic 2023 concluded last week and the TeleGeography team is still buzzing with excitement.

But who can blame us? When a conference only comes around every three years, there’s a lot to unpack.

This calls for a webinar.

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Kristin Carlson

Approaching a decade since SD-WAN emerged as a networking technology, it is safe to say nearly all corporate network managers have at least heard of SD-WAN.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced IT infrastructure teams to accommodate remote work and accelerated the shift to cloud services. These changes in the underlay shifted the cybersecurity threat landscape and drove SD-WAN vendors and customers to focus more on security than ever before.

SD-WAN is becoming more complex, integrating SASE architectures and improving services to meet the needs of the WAN world. 

When we first asked our WAN Manager Survey respondents about SD-WAN in 2018, interest was high, but few respondents had installed the technology or begun the rollout process.

Over the past four years, early adopters who finished their deployments have started to assess the impact, and more enterprises than ever are in the rollout stage. We’ve looked at the enterprise SD-WAN market every two years to see what has changed and solidified.

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Mei Harrison

Wanna look at some cool voice data?

The recent expansion of the i3forum's Insights tool has quite a bit of that. I've been itching to talk about it on TeleGeography Explains the Internet. So today we're chatting with the i3forum, a nonprofit industry body focused on "accelerating transformation across the carrier ecosystem."

Put another way: this consortium of carriers routinely collaborates on solving some of the biggest challenges facing their industry. And they have a really innovative way of sharing data among participants, to the benefit of all involved. (Non-members can participate in this data-sharing, too. More of that in our discussion.)

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Greg Bryan

The SD-WAN vendor landscape has changed.

Many of the familiar faces that pioneered initial SD-WAN services have been acquired, and a host of managed SD-WAN service providers have emerged as a popular option for many enterprise customers.

So in a world where information is power, a new hero has risen to provide SD-WAN vendor knowledge to those in need: TeleGeography’s 2023 SD-WAN Guide.

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Kristin Carlson