International bandwidth demand growing faster in emerging market routes?


Posted on April 17, 2013  /  1 Comments

Telegeography is a credible supplier of proprietary and expensive data on international bandwidth trends. What their latest report says is quite interesting:

International bandwidth demand growth has been robust on all five of the world’s major submarine cable routes, but has been particularly rapid on key routes to emerging markets in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. While bandwidth demand on the trans-Atlantic route—which has long been the world’s highest-capacity route—increased at a healthy rate of 36 percent annually between 2007 and 2012, demand for bandwidth from the U.S. to Latin America grew 70 percent per year over the same period, and demand for capacity on the Europe-Asia route via Egypt grew a staggering 87 percent per year.

1 Comment


  1. My best guess from the graph of TeleGeography: Europe-Asia via Egypt lit capacity has grown from 0.5 Tbps (2002~07) to 10.20 Tbps (2007~12). Intra-Asia lit capacity is up from 2.5 Tbps (2002~07) to 10.50 Tbps (2007~12).

    If combined, it’s lot higher than the trans-Atlantic bandwidth (Almost 12 Tbps). And I am not considering the trans-Pacific bandwidth as yet, to remain conservative.

    The bottom-line is: Asia badly needs to deploy overland fiber to meet its voracious appetite for bandwidth to communicate within and with Europe.