Submarine Cables

Nov 30, 2023

Want To Retire in Your 20s? Become a Submarine Cable

Wouldn't it be great to be fully retired before your 30th birthday?

Because they are engineered with a minimum design life of 25 years, it's common for the submarine cables that keep our world connected to experience this luxury.

Let’s talk about why, and what happens to cables after they reach retirement age.

Jul 20, 2023

Content Providers Are Still Hungry for Bandwidth

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.

Jun 7, 2023

Latin American Pricing Takeaways From ITW

Last month, the TeleGeography team joined scores of ICT infrastructure professionals in National Harbor, Maryland for International Telecommunications Week.

One of the many topics discussed was price erosion in Latin America. The main trend likely comes as no surprise: prices keep falling. But there is nuance to how price erosion is occurring in different markets.

Let’s explore the context in more detail.

Jan 4, 2023

AI vs. TeleGeography: The Submarine Cable Showdown

The TG team is enjoying OpenAI's new ChatGPT—an artificial intelligence assistant trained to answer questions and provide information on a wide range of topics—and our Slack channels show it.

As usual, we can't help talking about telecom, so our analysts have made a game of testing ChatGPT's submarine cable knowledge.

How well has it fared?

Dec 15, 2022

Latin American Market Trends: Brazil and Mexico

As telecom analysts, my TeleGeography colleagues and I have been busy attending conferences and gathering market intelligence from many of the most prominent telecom companies around the world.

Recently, our travels took us to São Paulo and Mexico City for the Futurecom and Mexico Connect 2022 conferences.

There’s a lot going on in both the Brazilian and Mexican markets, so let’s recap some of the discussion themes that stood out.

Oct 3, 2022

Gloomy Economic Indicators… Scary Future for the Subsea Cable Industry?

Some pretty ominous headlines have been circulating around the world lately regarding the risk of a global recession and the ongoing threat of inflation.

At TeleGeography, we've received several questions about how these economic indicators could impact the submarine cable industry.

In particular, people are curious to know if slowing economic growth impair international bandwidth demand growth on subsea cables. And will inflation lead to rising international bandwidth prices?

Aug 11, 2022

A is for Autonomous System: The Telecom Glossary of Your Dreams

Let's face it—there are a lot of definitions to memorize in the telecom space. And if you've ever racked your brain for what “MVNO” stands for on a Monday morning, you're not alone.

Here's a hot tip: there's a secret Telecom Glossary tucked away at the end of our free State of the Network Report.

Save it to your phone. Print it out and display it on your fridge. Or just keep reading to peruse the terms listed under A, B, and C.

Jul 20, 2022

Expectations for India’s Used International Bandwidth

Here's a headline you might have caught recently.

Our research indicates that India’s used international bandwidth is expected to grow at a compounded annual rate of 38% between 2021 and 2028. This rate of growth implies international bandwidth demand will increase 10 times over this period.

Jun 30, 2022

New Cables Are Coming to Africa

While used international bandwidth has significantly increased in Africa in recent years, the region has been plagued by submarine cable faults.

Here's a look at eight new cables planned to help reduce the impact of these faults and increase supply.

Apr 5, 2022

How Global Events Impact the Internet

We've discussed the ways in which the WAN is moving away from private networks and MPLS in favor of reliance on the public internet. Not to mention the costs and benefits of that evolution.

Although it's certainly always been the case that WAN managers must stay on top of internet performance and outages, this is increasingly crucial in the internet-first WAN era in which we find ourselves.