It turns out that birthday celebrations are in order.
The latest update of our Global Internet Geography research—which you can read up on here and here and here—marked our twentieth year of internet statistics and commentary.
Over the last decade, there has been substantial growth in demand for international bandwidth on major subsea cable routes.
In response to this rapid pace of demand growth (our research implies that demand is more than doubling every two years), there are over $2 billion of new cables entering service this year alone.
In short, demand is going up and we're seeing new cables.
This all makes sense.
But who is actually using this capacity? And will international demand continue to grow so expeditiously?
The internet has been buzzing this month.
What cut through the noise and captivated us in September?
First and foremost, a coder adapted our renowned Submarine Cable Map into a neat 3D visualization, sparking a larger conversation about all things cables with the team over at Vice.
The COVID-19 bump is over, at least as far as internet bandwidth demand goes.
This was a recurring theme during the recent discussion "How to Improve Your IP Traffic Performance and Security: Key Trends, Challenges, and Strategies," which was a special Carrier Community webinar sponsored by the team at GTT.
As Africa fuels new submarine cable development via the world’s highest international bandwidth growth rate, African network operators are rapidly evolving from network connectivity providers to digital service providers.
This metamorphosis requires a high-performance low-latency submarine network, broad geographic coverage, and access to data center assets.
Join our own Paul Brodsky and experts from Ciena and Angola Cables on October 6 at 11:00 a.m. ET for a live discussion on this topic.
Hold on, let me quickly grab my crystal ball.
Okay. Now that I've got that, let's see what it says about the future of the global internet. (And let's all agree that by "crystal ball" I mean "notes from our 2021 Global Internet Geography update.")
Now that internet backbone operators have adapted their networks to accommodate changes in traffic flows, they've resumed a more measured approach to capacity planning and network upgrades in 2021.
That means that price trends have resumed their downward trajectory and regional characteristics accordingly.
Guess what? We upgraded our Interactive Submarine Cable Map.
Your favorite cable resource—currently sponsored by HMN Tech—now depicts a huge 487 global cables and 1,304 unique landing stations. Even better, we layered in new functionality to search and select multiple cables, landing points, countries, RFS years, and suppliers.
We've been reading up on the myriad of cable updates that have been making headlines this summer. So it's no shock that our August list of reading recs leads off with news about Facebook's latest undersea investments, including their involvement in the recently-announced Apricot project.
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