Have you heard that submarine cable fiber pairs will eventually become a standard unit of purchase? I have. And it prompted me to roll up my sleeves and do some fact-checking.
Are people going to be buying fiber pairs? Will carriers? Enterprises?
Have you heard the one about 70% of the world’s internet traffic flowing through northern Virginia? This factoid has been cited in The Washington Post and Business Insider, among other major publications and government websites.
This statistic always seemed a little unlikely to us, so we sought out a few different ways to test its validity.
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.
Halloween—a time when boundaries between the living and the dead are blurred. It's a season for ghost stories and superstitions—black cats and voodoo dolls.
It seemed appropriate to use the spookiest day of the year to look at a few frightful scenarios for some of the world’s aging submarine cables.
As older cables’ economic lives draw to a close, the transition from life to death could take many scary forms.
The rapid pace of demand growth is only going to require more international bandwidth in the coming years. While there's certainly lots of investment in new systems, cables built in the late 1990s and early 2000s continue to play a key role in global connectivity. But are their days numbered?
It seems more likely than ever that some of these cables will soon become "extinct" as they are retired from service.
It's true. International internet capacity growth defied long-term trends in 2018 and accelerated for the first time since 2015.
This trend wasn't universal—many routes experienced slower growth in 2018. Nonetheless, global growth was buoyed by the large intra-European routes whose growth accelerated from 22 percent in 2017 to 36 percent in 2018.
TeleGeography started producing submarine cable maps in 1999, but we had been mapping the world of telecommunications for years before that.
Our first map was completed in 1996. This effort depicted several in-service cables. It also shows FLAG as a proposed cable, which is pretty neat.
Way back in 1998, a press release went out from Global Crossing about the first segment of their transatlantic fiber-optic cable.
"Global Crossing announced today that it has begun transmitting voice and data communication through Atlantic Crossing (AC-1)," read the release, touting the cable's state-of-the-art system. This segment will double the total capacity in service across the Atlantic Ocean! Full city-to-city connectivity! A link between Europe and the U.S.!
Did you catch what's so interesting about that language?
We’ve been making maps for a long time–since 1996, if you can believe it.
Our maps don the walls of telecom companies, network operations centers, regulatory agencies, boardrooms, and even museums. Two dozen have even found their way into the Library of Congress.
There is a lot of telecom history in these designs.
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