Hello, gentle readers, and welcome to the 2025 State of the Network Report—our eighth edition.
The TeleGeography team spent the last year compiling market surveys, building algorithms, and analyzing emerging trends, and now we're ready to share the highlights.
Transport Networks
The first chapter of the State of the Network is dedicated to the major global bandwidth headlines.
Here's an excerpt from this section:
Content provider demand is rapidly growing everywhere and outpaces demand growth even on routes where carriers continue to drive overall capacity usage. As might be expected, content provider demand growth is fastest in regions where carriers are still dominant, like Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. But there's no part of the globe where content demand growth isn't outpacing that of internet backbone providers.
IP Networks
You’ll find a snapshot of the global internet in chapter two.
The combined effects of new internet-enabled devices, growing broadband penetration in developing markets, higher broadband access rates, and bandwidth-intensive applications will continue to fuel strong internet traffic growth. While end-user traffic requirements will continue to rise, not all of this demand will translate directly into the need for new long-haul capacity. A variety of factors shape how the global internet will develop in coming years.
Data Centers
In chapter three, we peruse the latest in data centers.
Compounding the existing constraints on the data center market, we’ve reached a major inflection point in the development of AI, and more specifically, in the development of generative AI. AI work consists of two basic phases: training and inference (the work for which the model is trained). Each has a different impact on the data center market.
Cloud and WAN
Chapter four checks in on the cloud.
With a total count that nears 280, Asia is home to the most in-service cloud zones. Europe follows suit with over 130 in-service zones. Together, these two regions account for 63% of the world’s cloud data centers. The remainder are housed in the United States & Canada (20%), Latin America (6%), the Middle East (6%), Oceania (4%), and Africa (2%).
International Voice
Finally, the fifth chapter provides an update from the voice market.
The transition to mobile and social calling drove a 20-year boom in voice traffic, but has also left the industry uniquely vulnerable to the rise of mobile social media. While Skype was the dominant communications application for computers, a veritable menagerie of smartphone-based communications applications now pose a greater threat. We believe that WhatsApp had about 2.5 billion monthly active users in 2024, with Facebook Messenger topping 1.3 billion.
If you're interested in topics like subsea cable activity, cloud geography developments, the effect of AI on long-haul capacity requirements, and data center power scarcity, you're in the right place.
If you're interested in topics like subsea cable activity, cloud geography developments, the effect of AI on long-haul capacity requirements, and data center power scarcity, you're in the right place.
This report is just the tip of the iceberg (you’ll find much more within our full suite of research apps), but it’s a great sampling of our core data sets.
Thanks for your continued readership and interest in our work. You can download this year’s report over here.
