The internet depends on a network of submarine cables no thicker than a garden hose, yet these tiny conduits carry the vast majority of global internet traffic. As digital demand explodes and new cables proliferate, cable route engineers face an increasingly complex challenge: finding space on the seafloor for new systems while maintaining the safety and reliability of existing infrastructure.
Global internet bandwidth increased by 23% in 2025, maintaining its consistent pace of steady growth.
Total international bandwidth now stands at an impressive 1,835 Tbps, representing a four-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24%.
Although the pace of growth has slowed ever so slightly in recent years, bandwidth has still more than doubled since 2021.
Submarine cables carry over 99% of international data traffic and face unprecedented cybersecurity challenges that extend far beyond traditional network security.
In this episode of the TeleGeography Explains the Internet podcast, Ferris Adi, Chief Information Security Officer at Trans Americas Fiber System, recently shared insights on the evolving threat landscape and strategic approaches to protecting these vital assets.
Providers’ shift to predominantly 100 Gbps internet backbones continues to reduce the average cost of carrying traffic, enabling profitability at lower prices. As a result, price erosion remains the universal norm, reflecting the introduction of competition into new markets and the response of more expensive carriers to lower prices.
In this episode of the TeleGeography Explains the Internet podcast, senior analyst Lane Burdette takes listeners on a deep dive into the complex world of submarine cable economics.
How AI will impact enterprise networks is a huge topic that we're tackling in a multi-part series. In these posts, we're comparing the total cost of ownership (TCO) of a legacy MPLS network—one that still represents many multinationals’ WANs in 2025—to various hybrid or internet-first alternatives designed to accommodate changes brought by AI and cloud.
Predicting the future is hard.
As an analyst, that is exactly what people hope I can do. Of course, no one can predict the future, but we can model various outcomes given the best data we have on hand.
So using the data, let's make a prediction about the future impact of AI on enterprise networks.
There is no shortage of headlines about high-profile cable breaks, particularly around the Baltic Sea and Taiwan. But it's worth remembering that where there have been faults, there have also been repairs.
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