Lots of submarine cable chatter this week around the announcement of 2Africa, the latest cable from owners Facebook, Vodafone, MTN Group, China Mobile, WIOCC, Orange, Telecom Egypt, and Saudi Telecom.
We pulled several stories about the Facebook-backed cable, what it means for connectivity in the region, and how much folks expect it to cost. Keep scrolling for more.
My colleague Elizabeth Thorne and I have been working on busting–or confirming–WAN pricing myths that we’ve heard in the wild. Last time I took on MPLS and DIA price convergence.
I’m going to stick with DIA for this post, too.
Specifically, I want to know if Tier 1 IP providers charge more for DIA service than others. This is a myth I’ve actually argued in favor of in the past. It is certainly true that some carriers can provide a higher level of service, i.e. traffic that takes the fewest hops between destinations, and maybe even traffic that never touches another provider’s network. This might warrant higher prices.
Welcome back to the third installment of our mythbusting series, where we break down legends in telecom pricing and see if they hold water. (Don’t miss our investigations on tall tales in local access budgeting and MPLS/DIA pricing lore.)
Demand for international bandwidth is more than doubling every two years. To meet this demand, companies are investing in existing networks and in new infrastructure.
In our research, we think a lot about the nature of interconnection.
And in our ongoing effort to gauge the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on global networks, we wanted to highlight what’s happening in the nodes where interconnection takes place—data centers.
We spoke with experts across the market to get a sense of how they’re working through the crisis. They gave us insight on how the situation is affecting demand, operations, supply, and new construction.
With the update of data and analysis within our Global Bandwidth Research Service comes a refreshed look at our network pricing intel.
Yes, operators are racing to keep revenue margins ahead of eroding prices, while bandwidth demand and supply continue to grow across global routes. Abundant supply and increasing competition have led to this robust price erosion throughout the global bandwidth market.
New 100 Gbps-equipped submarine cable systems and upgrades to existing networks have further lowered unit costs. And this has driven down both 10 Gbps and 100 Gbps wavelength prices. Across critical global routes, weighted median 10 Gbps and 100 Gbps prices fell an average of 14% and 23% compounded annually since 2016.
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.
Headquartered in Amsterdam, United Group is a multiplay telecom and media provider that's developed a large footprint across southeast Europe. Last month, the company secured the acquisition of Tele2 Croatia from Sweden’s Tele2 Group.
The deal is valued at EUR220 million—easily one of United Group’s most notable takeovers.
We founded the WAN Summit with the intention of creating a space where enterprise network managers and vendors could come together to discuss trends in corporate networking. While our summits cover everything the WAN touches, it’s no secret that one topic has been at the forefront of many attendees’ minds: SD-WAN.
The latest figures from TeleGeography’s GlobalComms Forecast Service show that there were 7.95 billion cellular subscriptions worldwide at the end of 2019, up from 6.97 billion five years earlier and 4.61 billion at the end of 2009.
