Industry conferences are like orchestras: they bring together many sounds which may be hard for the untrained ear to differentiate.
We at TeleGeography are well-equipped to listen to the many melodies sung at telecom industry gatherings. Most recently, I joined colleagues in São Paulo to discuss regional trends at the Capacity LATAM event.
Today on TeleGeography Explains the Internet, we welcome Michael Martin, formerly a global network and security architect at McKinsey.
Michael has extensive experience and knowledge in the enterprise network space. I wanted to get his take on the industry's state of implementation of network automation among enterprises.
French billionaire Xavier Niel rose to prominence in the telecom world for his ownership of domestic telco Iliad. He went on to capture the industry’s attention when Iliad sparked a price war in the mobile sector when the telco’s Free Mobile unit launched in January 2012. (Niel employed a similar price-war tactic when Iliad Italia launched in May 2018.)
But these companies only represent the tip of the iceberg.
Indeed, the size and scale of Niel’s empire are often overlooked due to convoluted shareholder structures, the use of myriad holding companies – including NJJ Capital, Atlas Investissement and Iliad itself – and the lack of a unified brand name across markets.
Today we piece it all together to appreciate the bigger picture.
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.
