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.
The market for fixed broadband services in the Asia-Pacific region has expanded rapidly in recent years, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 17 percent between 2005 and 2017.
The region was home to more than 549 million fixed internet customers at the end of 2017, up 14 percent from 482 million 12 months earlier.
TeleGeography started producing submarine cable maps in 1999, but we were mapping the world of telecommunications years prior to that.
Our first map got off the ground in 1996. This effort depicted a number of 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?
How does one go about keeping track of nearly 400 submarine cable systems and over 1,000 landing stations?
Carefully, with lots of precise, year-round tracking, as it turns out.
In today's post, we're sharing secrets from our mapmakers about how our submarine cable map designs come together.
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.
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.
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