Carl Roberts is feeling energized.
The senior ICT executive and advisor to a myriad of C-suite teams—who is also the newest addition to TeleGeography's roster of Preferred Partners—recently chatted with the TeleGeography team about his time in the industry and the constant changes that have been an energizing force in his career.
At the end of 2024, the global mobile subscription total stood at 8.8 billion, according to figures from our GlobalComms Database. This is up from 8.7 billion a year earlier and 8.5 billion at end-2022.
Ten years ago, the total was closer to 7.0 billion; at the end of 2004, it was just 1.7 billion.
Datacloud Global Congress returns June 3-5, 2025, in Cannes.
And we have a birthday to celebrate. The event is recognizing 20 years as the premier global event for data center, cloud, AI, and investment leaders.
My family has probably watched Lord of the Rings a dozen times or more1. We can (and sometimes will) quote entire passages from the films.
It's true. The localization of content, applications, and compute in local hubs like São Paulo, paired with submarine cable delays, network buildout logistics, and the simple fact that bandwidth demand can't keep doubling, has slowed bandwidth demand in Latin America.
Content delivery networks (CDNs) are a geographically distributed network of servers (caches) that work together to deliver content by moving it closer to the end-users.
Back in early 2019, after months of speculation linking Telefonica to a sale of its Central American operations, the Spanish telecom giant agreed to offload all five of its units in the region.
By the end of 2019, the Madrid-based group had unveiled a five-point turnaround strategy to overhaul its business.
In early 2022, AWS announced a new element to its cloud network infrastructure: the local zone.
With increased focus on moving cloud services closer to end-users, the local zone provides low-latency access to applications running closer to customers.
Google offers a similar service with its dedicated interconnect service, an option to connect to a low-latency colocation facility that provides latencies of less than 5 milliseconds between the workloads in a specified region and the on-ramp location.
OVH launched the same local zone service in the first quarter of 2024, and Microsoft joined in as well with their extended zone service launched in the summer of 2024.
Here's how these services differ—and how many have launched.
We're pumped to have Dennis Thankachan, Co-Founder and CEO of Lightyear, back on TeleGeography Explains the Internet.
Last time Dennis joined us on the show, we dug into Lightyear's approach to creating a digital telecom lifecycle automation platform for enterprise networks.
This time, we discuss their State of Connectivity Report, which dovetails nicely with many of the issues we research here at TeleGeography. (Perhaps this read is a perfect companion to our State of the Network? A match made in heaven, etc.)
When discussing submarine cable bandwidth, it’s crucial to distinguish between lit capacity and potential capacity.
These terms are not interchangeable, and the difference between them explains a key aspect of the submarine cable market.
