There’s been a lot in the press recently about new low-orbit satellites. Rumors abound about content providers wanting to move their internet traffic off of the ocean floor and into space.
I call this one the price parity myth—the notion that one day bandwidth prices will be the same on all routes.
We’ve written quite a bit about content provider’s investments in new cables. And we’ve seen headlines about Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Facebook’s big new investments. So does that mean that content providers are the largest investors in new submarine cables?
Is it true that new cables are avoiding landing in the UK because of the Brexit vote? I was curious to see if there was any validity to this myth, so I took a closer look.
Our thirst for bandwidth must have a ceiling. It just must.
In our first-ever user-submitted myth, Chief Engineer of the Australia-Japan Cable Phil Murphy asked our experts a tough one. If it were possible to create the ultimate VR device that delivered a fully-immersive experience—catering to all possible sensory inputs—what would the bandwidth be and would our own senses create a cap?
In short: will sensory overload dictate an eventual bandwidth ceiling?
Have you heard that submarine cable fiber pairs will eventually become a standard unit of purchase? I have. And it prompted me to roll up my sleeves and do some fact-checking.
Are people going to be buying fiber pairs? Will carriers? Enterprises?
The submarine cable industry’s current practices will sustain our future capacity requirements. We definitely have enough capacity to take us well into the future. Right?
Have you heard the one about 70% of the world’s internet traffic flowing through northern Virginia? This factoid has been cited in The Washington Post and Business Insider, among other major publications and government websites.
This statistic always seemed a little unlikely to us, so we sought out a few different ways to test its validity.
My grandfather told stories about his days as a milkman in the 50s. To a kid growing up 30 years later, the concept seemed pretty weird. Why would someone drive to your house with your milk instead of you picking it up at the grocery store with the other food?
How many times have we heard that new undersea cables will bring consumers Internet speeds faster than a speeding bullet? (Like this or this or this.)
It has been reported that new cables promise speeds up to 10 million times faster than traditional home cable modems.
But here’s the kicker: there is no increased speed to be found in these submarine cable systems.
