The Blog

Mexican telecom giant America Movil (AM) recently struck an agreement to acquire 100 percent of Nextel Brazil from its co-owners, U.S.-based NII Holdings (70 percent) and AI Brazil Holdings (30 percent). They’ll pay $905 million for the business.

When the deal receives regulatory approval, Nextel will likely merge with AM’s existing Claro business. This will make use of Nextel’s substantial spectrum holdings in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.

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Tom Leins

Our regional maps have taken us to all corners of the globe. We've used them to explore telecommunications in the Middle East and track new cable projects in Africa.

Today, we're adding Latin America to that list. That's right—TeleGeography’s beautiful Latin America Telecommunications Map is finally here. It zeroes in on cable activity throughout South America, Central America, and the Caribbean.

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Lilian Lea

While independent SD-WAN vendors make their mark, traditional telecom service providers are rolling out their own managed SD-WAN offerings.

Yes, some have developed their own SD-WAN technology, but most carriers have partnered with an SD-WAN vendor to provide a managed SD-WAN option.

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Brianna Boudreau

As the telecom world prepares to enter the 5G era, our GlobalComms team has been tracking major 5G auctions around the globe. Catch up on all of them here.

Today we’ll look at what’s happening in major markets in the Middle East. We'll explore what’s happening in the Arab States that border the Persian Gulf, with a focus on Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

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Tom Leins

Halloween—a time when boundaries between the living and the dead are blurred. It's a season for ghost stories and superstitions—black cats and voodoo dolls. 

It seemed appropriate to use the spookiest day of the year to look at a few frightful scenarios for some of the world’s aging submarine cables.

As older cables’ economic lives draw to a close, the transition from life to death could take many scary forms.

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Alan Mauldin

The rapid pace of demand growth is only going to require more international bandwidth in the coming years. While there's certainly lots of investment in new systems, cables built in the late 1990s and early 2000s continue to play a key role in global connectivity. But are their days numbered?  

It seems more likely than ever that some of these cables will soon become "extinct" as they are retired from service.  

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Alan Mauldin

It's true. International internet capacity growth defied long-term trends in 2018 and accelerated for the first time since 2015.

This trend wasn't universal—many routes experienced slower growth in 2018. Nonetheless, global growth was buoyed by the large intra-European routes whose growth accelerated from 22 percent in 2017 to 36 percent in 2018.

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Alan Mauldin

TeleGeography started producing submarine cable maps in 1999, but we had been mapping the world of telecommunications for years before that.

Our first map was completed in 1996. This effort depicted several in-service cables. It also shows FLAG as a proposed cable, which is pretty neat.

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Jayne Miller

Way back in 1998, a press release went out from Global Crossing about the first segment of their transatlantic fiber-optic cable.

"Global Crossing announced today that it has begun transmitting voice and data communication through Atlantic Crossing (AC-1)," read the release, touting the cable's state-of-the-art system. This segment will double the total capacity in service across the Atlantic Ocean! Full city-to-city connectivity! A link between Europe and the U.S.! 

Did you catch what's so interesting about that language?

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Jayne Miller