Where Did the Minutes Go?
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.
Paul Brodsky is a Senior Research Manager at TeleGeography. He is part of the network, internet, cloud, and voice research team. His regional expertise includes Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
The international voice market's trajectory is down, and there's no reason to believe it's coming back.
Our recently updated TeleGeography Report and Database shows us exactly how fast traffic volumes are plummeting.
The combined effects of new internet-enabled devices, growing broadband penetration in developing markets, higher broadband access rates, and bandwidth-intensive applications will continue to fuel strong internet traffic growth.
While end-user traffic requirements will continue to rise, not all of this demand will translate directly into the need for new long-haul capacity.
A variety of factors shape how the global internet will develop in coming years.
If you want a single, simple number to identify the best-connected provider in the world, you may come away disappointed.
There are several ways to measure connectivity, and each highlights different strengths and weaknesses of a provider’s presence.
One basic metric is to count the number of unique Autonomous Systems (AS) to which a backbone provider connects, while filtering out internal company connections.
Here’s what we found.
The internet continues its return to normal—however one chooses to define this term—in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
With our newly updated Global Internet Geography Research Service,we conclude that the COVID-related expansion of internet traffic and bandwidth was largely a one-off phenomenon, and that the trends we had been observing in recent years have reasserted themselves.
International internet bandwidth and traffic growth have been gradually slowing in recent years, but they remain brisk.
Let's talk about that a bit.
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