Hello, gentle readers, and welcome to the 2025 State of the Network Report—our eighth edition.
The TeleGeography team spent the last year compiling market surveys, building algorithms, and analyzing emerging trends, and now we're ready to share the highlights.
In 2024, we saw many telecom headlines in the mainstream media. There were stories on the evening news about submarine cables relating to geopolitics, network outages, and even the potential impact of AI.
At this year’s Pacific Telecommunications Council conference, I thought it would be interesting to take a closer look at how those headlines actually impacted the market in terms of pricing.
Broadly speaking, telecom service providers have two ways of connecting traffic to a destination telco.
They can either connect directly with the destination carrier or route traffic to a wholesale carrier that connects to a destination telco.
Although many retail service providers, such as mobile operators, MVNOs, and cable broadband providers, rely heavily on wholesale carriers to transport and terminate their customers’ international calls, wholesale revenues are down 11% from ten years ago.
Let’s take a moment to dive in a bit and see what's going on.
We haven't been getting enough fiber here at TeleGeography Explains the Internet, but we're about to change that.
Nutritional jokes aside, this week, we welcome Todd Chapman, a veteran in fiber development, to the hot seat. Todd walks us through the ins and outs of Layer 0 of the physical infrastructure underlying data transmission. Some classic explaining of the internet.
In this episode, you'll get a walkthrough of the process that takes a fiber project from manufacturing to lit service—get ready to learn a thing or two about different types of fiber and their uses. We also get some good explanations of the dark fiber market and an overview of when enterprises might be interested in leasing dark fiber instead of lit service.
Here's a glimpse at what we discussed. Scroll to the bottom to listen to the whole discussion in its fiber-rich glory.
Digital Infrastructure Industry Expert Maya Glick has two decades in the digital infrastructure and telecommunications game.
Make some space on your wall.
The 2025 Africa Telecommunications Map is out—and it pairs perfectly with this year’s Submarine Cable Map.
Lately, I've been thinking about the movie director Alfred Hitchcock. One of his first big hits was a 1936 film called Sabotage.
The European telecommunications market has been a global trailblazer in terms of innovation, affordability of service, and infrastructure deployment. Few markets in the world have seen comparable levels of investment and competition.
Europe also crucially interconnects regions, providing key hubs for traffic exchange and access to content for Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.
The 2024 Capacity Europe conference in London highlighted the industry's progress and the challenges that lie ahead in the near and medium term. TeleGeography was there, not only with submarine cable maps in hand but also moderating panels on subsea cable route diversity and discussing current market trends with the industry’s leading experts.
So what did we learn?
Last week, Research Director Alan Mauldin joined Ciena’s Brian Lavallée for a live webinar exploring the technical and strategic drivers transforming the AI landscape.
Welcome back, TeleGeography Explains the Internet listeners. We took a nice long break for the holidays, and we've returned refreshed with another batch of telecom conversations for your feed.
Our first guest of 2025 is Fahim Sabir, Director of Digital Solutions at Colt.
