A (Refreshed) Checklist of Content material Suppliers’ Submarine Cable Holdings

For the final eight years, we have posted submarine cables owned by content material suppliers over right here. (Shout-out to the readers who had this one bookmarked.)

After we first printed this record in 2017, we had 20 cables listed. Quick-forward to right now, and our record has grown to 59—a large markup.

With such an uptick in content material supplier cables to trace, we figured it was value beginning a contemporary new record so that you can bookmark.

However first: what is the take care of content material suppliers and cables since we began monitoring this data almost a decade in the past?

Previously decade, few telecommunications trade tendencies have been as impactful because the rise of content material suppliers changing into the dominant customers of worldwide capability.

As you would possibly recall, content material suppliers’ urge for food for bandwidth ballooned within the early 2010s. In response, a few of these community operators transitioned from simply being prospects of wholesale capability to proudly owning transport community infrastructure.

This development started when Google turned an investor within the Unity cable consortium, which entered service in 2010.

Since then Meta, Microsoft, and, most lately, Amazon, have additionally invested in new submarine cable techniques both immediately or as main pre-sale purchasers.

Past these publicly disclosed cable investments within the desk beneath, content material suppliers have acquired partial or full fiber pairs on different submarine cables. Additionally they have leases and IRUs for managed capability on quite a few techniques as nicely.

 

We’ll replace this new record as these suppliers become involved in new cable initiatives or as different content material suppliers begin investing in comparable builds.

Who’re Content material Suppliers?

The time period content material supplier refers to a big selection of networks identified by a number of labels together with hyperscalers, OTTs (over-the-top suppliers), ICPs (web content material suppliers), or CSPs (cloud service suppliers). There are a few key segments inside the distinction of content material suppliers, and a few operators match multiple phase. These embody:

• Web-based content material and platform suppliers (e.g. Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, and TikTok mother or father firm ByteDance)
• Cloud service/platform suppliers (e.g. Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle, Alibaba, and Google)
• Content material Supply Networks (CDNs) (e.g. Akamai, CloudFlare)

For our analysis, we embody content material suppliers that function their very own long-haul networks as distinct from the general public web backbones run by carriers.

Content material 101

Our information exhibits that content material suppliers’ worldwide bandwidth progress has outpaced that of all different customers of capability lately.

This has been nothing wanting revolutionary in an trade lengthy dominated by conventional web carriers. In 2017, content material suppliers surpassed web spine suppliers as the most important customers of worldwide capability. This edge has grown quickly in subsequent years. Between 2019 and 2023 the quantity of worldwide capability deployed by content material networks almost quadrupled, reaching 3.6 Pbps.

World Content material Supplier Bandwidth