While artificial intelligence (AI) has been the most hyped demand driver in recent years, its impact on international internet capacity is not entirely clear.
A large amount of AI-driven demand is likely to be carried over the private networks of Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta. Microsoft's infrastructure is also supporting OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.
Here are some other factors that will shape how the global internet develops in the coming years.
Three years after the COVID-19 pandemic struck, the internet seems to have achieved a state of normalcy.
This can be seen across regions of the world. With the initial rapid traffic growth due to COVID-19 continuing to wane in 2023, many global networks appear to have started to return to more typical rates of utilization.
Let’s look at the numbers.
Luis Fiallo has been in the telecom industry for over 25 years. And for the majority of that time, he has been at China Telecom Americas, witnessing the many changes happening in the Latin American telecom market firsthand.
After years of helping to drive CTA's growth in the region, Luis, now Vice President, has many valuable insights to share with TeleGeography Explains the Internet.
Since this episode primarily focuses on Latin American networks and cloud developments, I invited my colleague Peter Wood, TeleGeography’s Senior Analyst covering Latin America.
The geographic coverage of carriers’ enterprise network services varies significantly. Not every carrier connects to every city in their customers’ networks, and not all services are available everywhere.
When narrowing down the universe of potential suppliers, enterprises must first consider how their geographic requirements overlap a potential service provider’s physical network. They then must determine if the specific data services they require are enabled at each of the service providers’ PoPs.
TeleGeography's WAN Services Coverage analysis—part of our Cloud and WAN Research Service—examines carrier network connectivity and service availability from a geographic perspective.
Here's a snippet of that analysis, followed by some handy definitions.
In case you missed it, we’re looking back at some previous hypothetical network scenarios to see how the cost of network ownership can change over time.
In last week’s blog, Senior Research Manager Brianna Boudreau explored our first tiered scenario, which takes a conservative approach to integrating internet services and SD-WAN into the WAN.
If you haven’t read it yet, I encourage you to start there. Brianna’s post also provides important context about our hypothetical network and baseline dual MPLS network.
For Part 2 of this analysis, I'll map out a second, less conservative tiered approach, then switch gears to our Remote Hybrid Network.
Let’s dive in.
Enterprise customers have embraced hybrid networks that employ multiple underlay technologies combined with an SD-WAN overlay. And for good reason.
Many SaaS applications and cloud services have been optimized to work over local internet connections rather than through central internet breakouts. The integration of an SD-WAN overlay addresses many of the concerns about network performance and security that come along with incorporating internet into the WAN.
And as we detailed in our recent blog series, the DIA and broadband services included in these hybrid networks are often cheaper than MPLS–sometimes considerably so. This allows WAN managers to reduce network spend or increase their capacity while staying within the same budget.
But even after enterprise customers have undergone a network transformation, it is still imperative for them to keep tabs on the market and assess what their network should cost. Particularly if their network contract includes a benchmarking clause.
With the latest update of our enterprise port pricing, we looked back at some previous hypothetical network scenarios to see how the cost of network ownership can change over time.
Earlier this week, I joined Ciena and Telstra for a live webinar highlighting Asia-Pacific market drivers, trends, and new cable builds.
During my session, which focused on Trans-Pacific submarine cable trends, content providers came up quite a bit.
These companies prioritize the need to link their data centers and major interconnection points. As such, they often deploy massive amounts of capacity on core routes.
The Trans-Pacific and Intra-Asia routes are two great examples.
Connectivity by satellite is not new, but expanding networks via low earth orbit (LEO) is a recent phenomenon receiving lots of investment.
As interest in LEO connectivity has grown, the number of companies looking to establish themselves in the market has also gone up. However, in recent conversations with satellite industry leaders, we’ve heard speculation that the market may have reached a saturation point.
That means mergers, acquisitions, and market consolidation are likely to occur. In fact, some of that has already begun to unfold.
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