It's true. International internet capacity growth defied long-term trends in 2018 and accelerated for the first time since 2015.
This trend wasn't universal—many routes experienced slower growth in 2018. Nonetheless, global growth was buoyed by the large intra-European routes whose growth accelerated from 22 percent in 2017 to 36 percent in 2018.
We get lots of questions about submarine cables.
Where are they? Who owns them? What happens when they break?
Today I wanted to tackle a few topics that come from investors who are eyeing the submarine cable market. We get plenty of questions about demand growth, the state of the market, and capacity price trends. To that I say: here are three things any investor should know about the submarine cable market.
Unlike previous submarine cable construction booms, content providers like Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft are taking a more active role in this recent surge.
Besides sharks eating undersea cables, one of the biggest myths that I’ve seen recently is Netflix being cited alongside Google, Facebook, and Microsoft as a contributor to new submarine cable investment.
We've been tracking the market for long-haul networks and submarine cables since 1999. Our data documents the tectonic shift from submarine cable consortium owners to private builders and the eventual tech bubble burst.
But what does the global wholesale bandwidth market look like today?
We pulled three facts out of our Global Bandwidth Research Service to paint a picture.
The global wholesale bandwidth market is influenced by many factors—some that change the face of the industry and others that contribute a certain measure of predictability.
The industry is perpetually marked by the impetus to keep innovation and cost competitiveness ahead of inevitable price erosion.
Earlier this year we fielded some of the most frequently asked questions about submarine cables. How do they work? How thick are they? How many kilometers of cable are there?
Today, we're going back under the sea to talk about what happens when bad things happen to good submarine cables.
I’ve been involved with TeleGeography’s research on submarine cables since 2000. Over the years I’ve fielded numermous questions about the submarine cable industry from journalists, investors, family, and friends.
It seems as good a time as any to provide a compilation of answers to some of the most commonly asked questions.