Global internet bandwidth rose last year by only 26%—the lowest annual growth rate seen in at least 15 years—and at a compound annual rate of 28% between 2015 and 2019.
Total international bandwidth now stands at 466 Tbps. The pace of growth is slowing, but it still represents a near-tripling of bandwidth since 2015.
We’ve written quite a bit about content provider’s investments in new cables. And we’ve seen headlines about Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Facebook’s big new investments. So does that mean that content providers are the largest investors in new submarine cables?
It's a new year—one in which we expect to see lots of new submarine cables enter service.
Today we're examining five noteworthy cables to look for in 2019. We'll highlight the content providers who are involved, ready for service dates, and the stats that make these cables stand out.
Halloween—a time when boundaries between the living and the dead are blurred. It's a season for ghost stories and superstitions—black cats and voodoo dolls.
It seemed appropriate to use the spookiest day of the year to look at a few frightful scenarios for some of the world’s aging submarine cables.
As older cables’ economic lives draw to a close, the transition from life to death could take many scary forms.
The rapid pace of demand growth is only going to require more international bandwidth in the coming years. While there's certainly lots of investment in new systems, cables built in the late 1990s and early 2000s continue to play a key role in global connectivity. But are their days numbered?
It seems more likely than ever that some of these cables will begin to go "extinct" in the near future as they are retired from service.
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.
