TeleGeography started producing submarine cable maps in 1999, but we had been mapping the world of telecommunications for years before that.
Our first map was completed in 1996. This effort depicted several in-service cables. It also shows FLAG as a proposed cable, which is pretty neat.
Way back in 1998, a press release went out from Global Crossing about the first segment of their transatlantic fiber-optic cable.
"Global Crossing announced today that it has begun transmitting voice and data communication through Atlantic Crossing (AC-1)," read the release, touting the cable's state-of-the-art system. This segment will double the total capacity in service across the Atlantic Ocean! Full city-to-city connectivity! A link between Europe and the U.S.!
Did you catch what's so interesting about that language?
We get lots of questions about submarine cables.
Where are they? Who owns them? What happens when they break?
Today I wanted to tackle a few topics that come from investors who are eyeing the submarine cable market. We get plenty of questions about demand growth, the state of the market, and capacity price trends. To that I say: here are three things any investor should know about the submarine cable market.
You might have heard about a recent cable cut near Mauritania.
The short version? On March 30, damage to the ACE cable disrupted internet service to connected countries, with reported problems occurring over the next several days. The Dyn blog reported that “of the countries listed as having landing points for the ACE Submarine Cable, 10 had significant disruptions evident in Oracle’s Internet Intelligence data.”
Besides sharks eating undersea cables, one of the biggest myths that I’ve seen recently is Netflix being cited alongside Google, Facebook, and Microsoft as a contributor to new submarine cable investment.
We've been tracking the market for long-haul networks and submarine cables since 1999. Our data documents the tectonic shift from submarine cable consortium owners to private builders and the eventual tech bubble burst.
But what does the global wholesale bandwidth market look like today?
We pulled three facts out of our Transport Networks Research Service to paint a picture.
Earlier this year we fielded some of the most frequently asked questions about submarine cables. How do they work? How thick are they? How many kilometers of cable are there?
Today, we're going back under the sea to talk about what happens when bad things happen to good submarine cables.
In Part II of TeleGeography's Mythbusters presentation at SubOptic 2016, Alan Mauldin busted five myths that ranged from whether capacity demand is doubling every two years to a quote from the movie Gravity that the destruction of a single satelite would lead to half of North America "losing their Facebook." In the concluding part of this series, Tim Stronge returns to the stage to take on myths about energy costs pushing decisions about content providers' data center locations, multiple parties building on the same route and "adult" content driving most Internet traffic.
In the first part of TeleGeography’s Mythbusters presentation at SubOptic 2016, Tim Stronge busted myths about NSA surveillance, decreases in connectivity to the United States, and shark attacks on the internet.
In Part II, Alan Mauldin investigates whether submarine cable capacity is doubling every two years, if content providers really need fiber pairs everywhere, if the global network is more resilient than ever before, whether Netflix has huge subsea capacity requirements and the possibility that the destruction of a single satelite would cause half of North America to "lose their Facebook."
TeleGeography’s Tim Stronge and Alan Mauldin returned to the triennial SubOptic conference this year to deliver a follow-up to their popular and humorous submarine cable mythbusting master class from the 2013 event. In just over an hour, Tim and Alan “exploded” eleven of the most prevalent myths about the submarine cable industry. To cover the scope of the master class, we’ll be recapping the entire presentation over the course of a three-part blog series.
Copyright © 2025 TeleGeography.
