If we think beyond quarantine, how do we envision getting back to work? Is office culture dead? Is it just on hold? Are big companies going to be less willing to fork over massive amounts of money for downtown office space?
These are among the questions pondered in one of our recommended reads for the month. Click below to peruse Rani Molla's thoughtful piece on the state of the office.
Be honest: do you actually know how many kilometers of submarine cables live under the ocean? Do you know the obscure locations that got a new cable in 2020? Or what actually damages cables? (Don't say sharks.)
You know the drill. There are lots of good posts about cables, broadband, wireless networks, and data centers floating around out there. We grab a handful of the ones making the rounds in our Slack channels and share with you.
This month we're reading about broadband in the U.S., undersea data centers, AI, Altice, and lots more. Catch up on our reading queue below.
Will COVID-19 leave a lasting mark on the global internet?
Based on discussions and surveys with dozens of network operators around the globe, we believe that COVID-related expansion in internet traffic and bandwidth is largely a one-off phenomenon. It seems likely that the trends we've observed in recent years will largely continue.
The global outbreak of COVID-19 and its associated economic and social impact has laid bare the crucial, irreplaceable role that the internet plays in our daily lives.
Starting in March 2020, internet traffic patterns shifted and volumes surged as students around the world learned from home, adults worked from home, and everybody did at least something from home.
To its enormous credit, the internet bent but—for the most part—did not break as network operators scrambled to deal with the swell in traffic.
Our cable map team has made plenty of additions in the last few months. We're finally getting around to sharing some related stories from around the web.
For starters, you can read up on an upcoming 13,000-kilometer link between Chile and Australia—and related politics in the Pacific. We also have stories about Facebook's grand internet ambitions and Google's Grace Hopper.
All this and more is below. >>
We've made it to that slow and hazy last week of July. Seems like a good time to shake things up and share some free research.
Fact: you can sample the data that fuels blog posts like this and this and this. Keep scrolling to browse report content that's currently available to download at no cost.
It's a tale of two submarine cables. Both are huge, headline-grabbing projects, but they're having very different moments in the spotlight this month.
Early in the calendar year is map design season around TeleGeography. Colorful proofs arrive at the office, which the design team pores over, so as not to miss any details. No cable left behind. No design flourish left unexamined.
So when the DC office packed up and transitioned to remote work in March 2020, we were left to wonder: how were we going to finish our cable map from within quarantine?
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