Hello, gentle readers, and welcome to the 2025 State of the Network Report—our eighth edition.
The TeleGeography team spent the last year compiling market surveys, building algorithms, and analyzing emerging trends, and now we're ready to share the highlights.
In 2024, we saw many telecom headlines in the mainstream media. There were stories on the evening news about submarine cables relating to geopolitics, network outages, and even the potential impact of AI.
At this year’s Pacific Telecommunications Council conference, I thought it would be interesting to take a closer look at how those headlines actually impacted the market in terms of pricing.
The European telecommunications market has been a global trailblazer in terms of innovation, affordability of service, and infrastructure deployment. Few markets in the world have seen comparable levels of investment and competition.
Europe also crucially interconnects regions, providing key hubs for traffic exchange and access to content for Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.
The 2024 Capacity Europe conference in London highlighted the industry's progress and the challenges that lie ahead in the near and medium term. TeleGeography was there, not only with submarine cable maps in hand but also moderating panels on subsea cable route diversity and discussing current market trends with the industry’s leading experts.
So what did we learn?
Happy holidays, TeleGeography Explains the Internet listeners.
We hope you're savoring the brief week between Christmas and New Year's when the world takes a moment to pause and reflect. School is out, schedules are topsy-turvy, and cookies are acceptable for breakfast. Perhaps like some of us, you've lost track of movies watched and presents wrapped.
If you're looking to take a break between the winter gatherings, grab some headphones. We've got you covered for an hour or so.
Last month, I had the pleasure of speaking at Cairo ICT about colocation and connectivity trends.
I covered global bandwidth first, followed by a rundown on bandwidth in the Middle East and Africa.
Next up, data centers and interconnection hubs, with a discussion on where the hubs are, what makes a hub, and how hubs grow. Finally, I talked about end-user demand, which is very important with the growth of internet and demand.
You can catch a video of this presentation and download my slides below.
ICYMI: we recently launched a dynamic new tool called the Market Connectivity Score (MCS).
The MCS is our answer to the question “Where is the next big hub going to be?” and pulls from our wide array of research areas to evaluate the health of more than 3,000 metropolitan markets worldwide.
Today, let's take a brief look at three of the markets highlighted in the MCS: Frankfurt, Singapore, and São Paulo.
The role of business broadband in WAN architecture is evolving. It’s no longer just a backup option—many enterprises now rely on it for core connectivity.
Thanks to the rise of cloud services and SaaS applications, broadband’s flexibility and cost-effectiveness make it a strong contender against legacy services like MPLS and DIA.
We’ve collected data from 170+ countries for our Business Broadband Pricing Database, covering nearly 7,000 broadband plans that range from 1 Mbps to 10 Gbps.
Here’s what we found:
Another year, another African Peering and Interconnection Forum (AfPIF) keynote presentation for Senior Research Manager Patrick Christian.
His 2024 African Network Geography Update explored global network trends, as well as African bandwidth trends, interconnection hub trends, and end-user demand. There was a special focus on Kinshasa, where this year’s AfPIF conference was held.
What are the best-connected hubs in Africa? Where are new and planned submarine cables landing? Is intra-African bandwidth gaining traction?
Carrier-grade Ethernet is a critical piece of today’s enterprise WAN, and carriers continue to expand their network footprints and make higher capacities available.
TeleGeography’s latest Bandwidth Price Report—drawn from our Network Pricing Database—takes a deep dive into Ethernet’s place in the WAN and analyzes recent pricing trends across geographies and capacities, focusing on Ethernet over MPLS (EoMPLS) and Ethernet over DWDM (EoDWDM).
Trends in the IP transit market generally follow regional trends of the transport market.
And while some have suggested that price erosion may slow as a result of recent inflation and supply chain constraints (as it has in the wavelength market), we have not seen this trend make its way into the IP transit market.
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