Brian Lavellée, Director of Portfolio Marketing at Ciena, posed this question to webinar-watchers last Wednesday. How great would it be if you got an advanced warning prior to a submarine cable going down?
Brian was joined by TeleGeography Senior Analyst Brianna Boudreau to tackle this idea and others about the cable business.
Brianna kicked things off with a closer look at who and what is driving bandwidth demand, highlighting solid growth in international demand. (Fun fact: no region has experienced annual growth of less than 40% in the last five years.)
Also of note? Private internet growth has outpaced capacity demand in recent years – something you might have heard about on our blog already.
Brian jumped in with some observations about the size and resiliency of the submarine cable market, noting that “there’s a huge gap between reliability of network and the dependency we have on the network.”
Although he categorizes the industry as almost “too big to fail,” he highlighted new technologies and big data analytics as a vital components to protecting the critical bandwidth that is being turned up on cables right now.
“Open” cables, which Brian described as networks based on the “best and free technology” were among the strategies covered. As opposed to buying proprietary solutions (“closed” networks), Brian sees a connection between how open the network, the amount of data you can connect, and making better decisions in the care and keeping of cables. “It’s the analytics that’s important. It’s what you do with the data and how you make it actionable,” he said.
"It’s what you do with the data and how you make it actionable."
You can dig into Brian and Brianna’s conversation above, including a few ideas for how analytics can support a system in which, yes, submarine cables let you know before they fail.
Follow us at @TeleGeography or check back here for more webinar and submarine cable goodness.
Want to take a closer look at Brianna's presentation slides? Look no further.