Readers of our Pricing Suite's latest Bandwidth Pricing Report already know that the Middle East serves as both an important node and a crucial transitway for international capacity.
Cable operators were extremely busy between 2011 and 2017 when they turned up nine new cables in the region. But submarine cable activity slowed quite a bit between 2018 and 2020, as no new cables were launched in the region.
While 5G is still in its early stages of deployment, there are already preparations being made for the introduction of its successor. The initial technical standards for 6G aren’t expected until the second half of this decade, but this hasn’t prevented some players from getting an early start.
We're going back to the middle. The middle mile, that is.
Like many telecom terms, this is one that you might have to follow up with “what exactly do you mean by that?”
The network faced a host of new demands and challenges in 2020, but many of the key trends that characterized the wholesale market prior to the pandemic held true.
Demand growth remains robust. And while the pace of price erosion moderated in many markets over the past year, prices still continued to decline.
With the annual update of our Global Bandwidth Research Service comes new insights for 2021.
Here's the big news: between 2018 and 2020 alone, international bandwidth used by global networks more than doubled to exceed 2,000 Tbps.
What's everyone been reading this month?
The average enterprise network had MPLS running at 82% of sites in 2018. That fell to just 58% in 2020. About one-third of those networks have active backups for their MPLS service—a quarter of them have passive backups.
Looking at these numbers, we have to ask: what role will MPLS play in the WAN moving forward?
In September 2020, U.S. telecom giant Verizon announced the surprise takeover of prepaid MVNO TracFone Wireless. The deal is worth a whopping $6.25 billion.
Verizon hopes that the transaction will help it compete in the prepaid space, where T-Mobile U.S. and AT&T rule the roost with their Metro by T-Mobile and Cricket Wireless brands.
Despite the expanding role satellite providers have in delivering connectivity, the vast majority of intercontinental capacity is carried by submarine cables.
This will likely always be the case, but new constellation projects are poised to reshape how broadband is delivered to end users.
There's plenty happening along the critical Europe-East Asia subsea route.
Senior Manager Jon Hjembo recently treated the Transport Networks Russia & CIS Conference to a virtual presentation on all things Europe-East Asia backbone transport, highlighting big developments and persistent trends in the region.
