Networks

Oct 4, 2018

Is a Mass Extinction of Submarine Cables Looming?

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.  

Sep 20, 2018

International Internet Capacity Growth Just Accelerated for the First Time Since 2015

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.

Aug 9, 2018

The Ultimate Throwback Thursday: TeleGeography's First Map

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.

Jul 30, 2018

Happy Anniversary to the AC-1: A Twenty Year Retrospective at Subsea EMEA

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?

Jul 10, 2018

Our New E-book Contains Nearly 50 Maps and 20 Years of Telecom History

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.

Jun 12, 2018

Three Things Investors Should Know About the Submarine Cable Market

We get lots of questions about submarine cables.

Where are they? Who owns them? What happens when they break?

Today I wanted to tackle a few topics that come from investors who are eyeing the submarine cable market. We get plenty of questions about demand growth, the state of the market, and capacity price trends. To that I say: here are three things any investor should know about the submarine cable market.

May 30, 2018

Content, Capacity, and the Great, Growing Demand for International Bandwidth

Global bandwidth demand continues to grow, spurring terrestrial and submarine cable network operators to undertake extensive network upgrades and deployments.

May 2, 2018

Submarine Cable Redundancy, Explained

You might have heard about a recent cable cut near Mauritania.

The short version? On March 30, damage to the ACE cable disrupted internet service to connected countries, with reported problems occurring over the next several days. The Dyn blog reported that “of the countries listed as having landing points for the ACE Submarine Cable, 10 had significant disruptions evident in Oracle’s Internet Intelligence data.”

Apr 10, 2018

Where Are the World's Cloud Data Centers and Who is Using Them?

TeleGeography’s Cloud and WAN Infrastructure details the international wide area network (WAN) services, cloud connectivity offerings, and cloud geographies of 170 WAN service providers.

Since the 2018 update is now available to our subscribers, we thought it would be a good time to take a closer look at who is connecting to the cloud and where cloud data centers are located based on our latest batch of data.

Oct 30, 2017

Stranger Things: Why Netflix Isn’t Behind New Submarine Cable Builds

Besides sharks eating undersea cables, one of the biggest myths that I’ve seen recently is Netflix being cited alongside Google, Facebook, and Microsoft as a contributor to new submarine cable investment.