You've probably read about the global chip shortage the world is facing due to supply chain issues. As it turns out, there's also a shortage of undersea cable-laying ships.
You'll find more on this topic below, followed by a few other headlines that made our November list of telecom reading recs.
Another telco supply-chain shortage: cable ships
Just how serious is the cable ship scarcity? In short, “Supply of cable vessels is near a breaking point as relentless cost-cutting drives out profit down the supply chain.”
With the availability of cable maintenance ships also strained, the situation could soon become a “crisis in the industry.”
This Light Reading piece will fill you in on what you need to know.
The Most Vulnerable Place on the Internet
In other cable news, WIRED published an article earlier this month breaking down “the fragility of the world’s 550-plus subsea internet cables, plus the outsized role Egypt and the nearby Red Sea have in the internet’s infrastructure.”
It's a great read, and you’ll see our own Submarine Cable Map and Research Director Alan Mauldin featured.
It’s the Mappiest Season of All
If you'd like to have a physical copy of the Submarine Cable Map, our map sale is still going strong!
Through December 31, 2022, you can use promo code DECKTHEWALLS to save 50% on all our telecommunications maps, while supplies last.
Modeling the Coming Changes in the WAN
Senior Manager Greg Bryan just released a guest post for MEF. Give it a read to explore how the work the industry is doing at MEF relates to on-the-ground enterprise network deployments and WAN revenues.
(Greg actually met his most recent podcast guest—Orchest’s Jeremy Villalobos—at a MEF event. You can listen to that interview over here.)
A 2022 Update on Interconnection Geography
Did you catch Senior Research Manager Patrick Christian's Global Capacity Update at the 2022 European Peering Forum?
Revisit his slides (or see them for the first time) for international bandwidth developments, pricing trends, IX, CDN, and cloud data center growth, and more.
Think you’ve got something that should be on our monthly reading list? Tweet it to us @TeleGeography.