It’s no secret that the last few years have seen an unprecedented amount of subsea cable capacity flooding onto the market to meet radically escalating demand.
The extent of this boom is revealed in new figures from analyst firm TeleGeography, showing that between the beginning of 2006 and the end of 2010, demand for international bandwidth grew seven-fold.
Network operators have matched this demand with a flurry of activity. Old networks have been upgraded well beyond any capacity levels that were initially envisaged, while 49 brand new undersea systems were launched, costing around $6.5 billion between them.
Capacity demand has grown fastest on links to Africa, Latin America and the Middle East, these regions between them experiencing growth in demand of more than 80% per year over those five years. Mature markets have demonstrated hunger too, with international bandwidth usage increasing 63% per year in Europe and 54% in the US and Canada over the period. Supply has more or less mirrored this demand, growing 53% overall in 2010, representing an additional 16.1Tbps of new...