Happy holidays, TeleGeography Explains the Internet listeners.
What were the big cable headlines of this year, and what do you need to know about transport networks in 2026?
To find out, we're kickstarting our three-episode review of What to Know in the New Year. To start, we have a submarine and terrestrial infrastructure review alongside friends of the pod Lane Burdette and Paul Brodsky.
Listen to the full episode below.
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While 2025 was already a strong year with approximately 15 new submarine cables entering service—representing about $3.2 billion in value—2026 is projected to see nearly 40 cables come online.
This potential surge represents a capital expenditure of roughly $6 billion, which is the highest number seen in at least a decade. Despite this massive influx of capacity, analysts do not foresee a price collapse because much of this infrastructure is being built directly by content providers, such as Google, for their own internal use rather than for competitive sale.
The Red Sea has become a critical bottleneck due to conflict in Yemen, which has made it extremely difficult for repair ships to secure permits to fix damaged cables, leaving some systems stranded indefinitely. To mitigate reliance on this route and the traditional transit through Egypt, the industry is increasingly developing terrestrial fiber networks through Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Jordan, and Israel.
Additionally, new submarine routes are being designed to skirt other sensitive areas, such as the South China Sea, utilizing paths through Indonesia and the Philippines instead.
The rise of AI is reversing traditional network planning; rather than data centers being built where networks exist, network connectivity is now "chasing" data centers to locations where electrical power is available.
This has led to infrastructure development in novel locations ranging from West Texas and Iowa to Christmas Island, the latter serving as a new hub for Google's systems. Because the future bandwidth demands of AI are still unknown, companies are prioritizing the accumulation of dark fiber and diverse routes now to ensure they're not caught short later.
There's a massive disparity in capacity potential between terrestrial and submarine networks due to the availability of electrical power for signal amplification.
While terrestrial conduits can support thousands of fiber pairs because power is easily accessible, submarine cables are currently limited to roughly 24 fiber pairs because of the difficulty in sending electricity across oceans to power amplifiers.
Consequently, while subsea capacity is a scarce asset, terrestrial developers can push massive amounts of bandwidth and focus on creating resilient mesh networks with four or five diverse routes into key nodes.
How do we understand and address the challenges facing the submarine cable maintenance sector? That's what Mike Constable of Infra Analytics and TeleGeography’s Lane Burdette and Alan Mauldin lay out in this landmark report. Download the report here.
Earlier this year, we released a special six-part series on everything you need to know about submarine cables. ⬇️
Data and analysis on long-haul networks and the undersea cable market, with forecasts of international bandwidth supply, demand, prices, and revenues. Take a look at the platform here.
Data and analysis on international internet capacity, traffic, service providers, and pricing, with forecasts of IP transit service volumes, prices, and revenues by country and region. Check out how it works.