Sep 2, 2016
The Truth About Digital Traffic Jams
If you've ever seen that little buffer symbol on your laptop screen as you wait for a movie to load, you know what digital traffic jams feel like.
If you've ever seen that little buffer symbol on your laptop screen as you wait for a movie to load, you know what digital traffic jams feel like.
How many times have we heard that new undersea cables will bring consumers Internet speeds faster than a speeding bullet? (Like this or this or this.)
It has been reported that new cables promise speeds up to 10 million times faster than traditional home cable modems.
But here’s the kicker: there is no increased speed to be found in these submarine cable systems.
Answer: the definition of broadband is, formally, “a high-capacity data transmission type that can handle multiple types of traffic at once.”
But in the context of internet access, broadband is used to mean any high-speed Internet access that is always on and faster than traditional dial-up access.
In Part II of TeleGeography's Mythbusters presentation at SubOptic 2016, Alan Mauldin busted five myths that ranged from whether capacity demand is doubling every two years to a quote from the movie Gravity that the destruction of a single satelite would lead to half of North America "losing their Facebook." In the concluding part of this series, Tim Stronge returns to the stage to take on myths about energy costs pushing decisions about content providers' data center locations, multiple parties building on the same route and "adult" content driving most Internet traffic.
In the first part of TeleGeography’s Mythbusters presentation at SubOptic 2016, Tim Stronge busted myths about NSA Surveillance, decreases in connectivity to the United States and shark attacks on the internet. In Part II, Alan Mauldin investigates whether submarine cable capacity is doubling every two years, if content providers really need fiber pairs everywhere, if the global network is more resilient than ever before, whether Netflix has huge subsea capacity requirements and the possibility that the destruction of a single satelite would cause half of North America to "lose their Facebook".
TeleGeography’s Tim Stronge and Alan Mauldin returned to the triennial SubOptic conference this year to deliver a follow-up to their popular and humorous submarine cable mythbusting master class from the 2013 event. In just over an hour, Tim and Alan “exploded” eleven of the most prevalent myths about the submarine cable industry. To cover the scope of the master class, we’ll be recapping the entire presentation over the course of a three-part blog series.
As kids, many of us attached a pair of tin cans to the ends of a long string to create a primitive telephone. Somewhat ironically, modern global telecommunications still functions in a somewhat similar manner.
Reducing the latency (delay) of network traffic between locations has been the focus for financial firms engaged in high-frequency trading for several years, but this is also a goal for gaming companies as well. In a series of blog posts, Riot Games discussed how they have designed their own latency-optimized network. When linking destinations around the world, comparing the latency of the various submarine cables is critical.
Loosely based on TeleGeography's Submarine Cable Map, a Netherlands artist, Jeroen van Loon, created an art installation that depicts Internet data as ephemeral and temporary.
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