The global outbreak of COVID-19—and its associated economic and social impact—has upended the way billions of people live their lives.
Has it had an impact on international calling?
The global outbreak of COVID-19 and its associated economic and social impact has laid bare the crucial, irreplaceable role that the internet plays in our daily lives.
Starting in March 2020, internet traffic patterns shifted and volumes surged as students around the world learned from home, adults worked from home, and everybody did at least something from home.
To its enormous credit, the internet bent but—for the most part—did not break as network operators scrambled to deal with the swell in traffic.
The global outbreak of COVID-19—and its associated economic impact—has amplified the role played by the international telecommunications industry and the bandwidth market that underpins it. The global bandwidth market has always been marked by change and uncertainty, and the current crisis is just an extreme example of this.
The international voice market doesn't bring a lot of joy these days. (For that, may I suggest adopting a puppy?)
As we've written before, 2015 marked a turning point in the international voice market. It was the first time since the Great Depression that international call traffic declined, even if only by one half percent.
And it's been downhill ever since, as the slump in voice traffic has turned into a fact of life. Carriers’ traffic fell a further 9% in 2017 and then another 4% in 2018, to a total of 465 billion minutes.
One of our recent recommended reads was all about what happened when a cable was cut near Mauritania.
The short version? On March 30, damage to the ACE cable disrupted internet service to connected countries, with reported problems occurring over the next several days. The Dyn blog reported that “of the countries listed as having landing points for the ACE Submarine Cable, 10 had significant disruptions evident in Oracle’s Internet Intelligence data.”
Many retail service providers—mobile operators, MVNOs, and cable broadband providers—rely heavily on wholesale carriers to transport and terminate their customers’ international calls.
With the recent update to the TeleGeography Report and Database, we know that wholesale carriers terminated approximately 363 billion minutes of traffic in 2016, down four percent from 2015.
According to NASA, light travels at a constant, finite speed of 186,000 mi/sec.
So the speed of light never changes. End of blog post, right?
Wrong.
This June, Broad Group’s DataCloud Europe 2016 brought some 1,500 participants representing 73 countries to Monaco.
I was pleased to be one of those 1,500 people. For the TeleGeography readers who couldn’t be in Monaco this year: don’t worry – today I’m sharing highlights from the epicenter of the conference.
