Submarine cables over the last 100 years have played a vitally important role in making the world a smaller place. Today, submarine cables are making the world a smaller connected community as a result of high speed, instant, and effective communications. Submarine cables continue to carry the majority of financial transactions, social media, government communication, and commerce on an unprecedented level. Many readers most likely grew up with radio or black and white television prior to the current technological revolution that’s taken place be it cell phones, high speed broadband at home, streaming videos and near perfect 4K connections from half way around the world and no doubt, have a true appreciation for the evolution that has taken place in the last 50 years.
APTelecom see’s submarine cables continuing to play an important role as traffic becomes more direct (ie: less dependency on traditional hub and spoke routes of the USA, UK, Japan, etc. as local content continues to be developed). For example, the Southern Hemisphere is well positioned to continue to build modern and cost-effective, high-end transmission capacity to the rest of the world. This connectivity will promote further trade and commerce and redefine routing traffic in the very near future.
Submarine Cable capacity for reasons of diversity in avoiding points of failure and ‘enabling always on’ networks is critical for banking and finance, aviation, and various other industries that utilize cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and are poised to seize on the upcoming 4th Industrial Revolution of automation. Networks are critical to delivering software and services in an advanced and in many cases near real time basis that could have only been imagined some 50 years ago. In many areas of technology, we are even approaching Shannon’s law limits and the theoretical capacity that is possible over submarine cables and terrestrial cables.
Looking at the current submarine cable market, prices continue to decline in line with Moore’s Law, yet with the increase in computing power doubling and in some cases tripling, coupled with advancements in line card and LTE technology it’s a testament to the research and development teams around the globe in action. Many global submarine routes only offer 100G interfaces replacing the old STM-4 and 10G’s of bygone days. No doubt, 1Tb cards will be available in no time soon.
As CEO of APTelecom, its with tremendous pleasure and pride to support many existing and new submarine cable systems in the Asia Pacific, LATAM, and Atlantic regions. From our perspective, the Arctic region will likely have a system built in less than three to five years, the Southern Hemisphere will continue to build out, seeking diversity creating new hubs around the world that rival the likes of Los Angeles, London, New York, and Tokyo. Pressure is building for more cost-effective cables using new raw materials due to build cost pressure to support those rolling out SDN and cloud-based solutions that require five to seven paths on one particular route in order to have secure, diverse, and reliable transmission service linking countries around the world.
We hope you enjoy this report and wish you all the best as your likely downloading this PDF which at some point the bits to enable viewing are being delivered over a submarine cable in some depths of the ocean across the planet!