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.
Note: as of June 2024, we've continued tracking content provider-owned cables over here.
Unlike previous submarine cable construction booms, content providers like Amazon, Google, Meta (formerly 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.
