Although the voracity of private and professional users for data is undeniable year after year, the bandwidth that allows us to feed ourselves with content – mostly from the catalogs of the major digital platforms – is also expanding to keep pace.
According to the annual report published by the very informed Telegeography Institute, the total international transmission capacity in 2021 amounted to 786 Tb/s, an increase of 29% over one year. Excluding 2020, a record year in which total signal bandwidth grew 34% year-on-year, it grew to a compound annual growth rate of 29 % over the last four years… A percentage equal to that of global internet traffic itself over the period.
According to Telegeography, average growth in international traffic fell from 48% over the 2019-2020 period to 23% between 2020 and 2021, while peak traffic growth fell from 46% to 26% over the same period.
The end of the health crisis – which had led to a strong growth in uses linked to the rise of teleworking and distance education – is not unrelated to this sudden deceleration in the demand for bandwidth. “After an initial peak in traffic with the onset of the pandemic, many operators indicated a stabilization in demand growth and a return to typical growth rates. “As you would expect, the return to more normal usage levels has resulted in a substantial decline in average and peak traffic in 2021.”
Very gourmet GAFAMs… But not everywhere
The digital giants – starting with Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and even Netflix – are largely responsible for the increase in demand for bandwidth. Since 2020, the Telegeography Institute has noted that these companies and the services they provide represent two-thirds of all international capacity used.
However, their impact on bandwidth is not felt with the same intensity depending on the routes taken by international networks. “The top priority for content providers in planning their international network is to connect their data centers and major interconnection points. As such, they often take up huge capacity on major routes, while focusing less than traditional carriers on secondary roads,” the institute notes.
And to note that in 2020, content providers represented 91% of the capacity used on the routes of the transatlantic data networks, but only 12% on those going from the Old Continent to East Asia. According to the Telegeography Institute, the global demand for bandwidth is expected to continue to grow over the next few years, due to the introduction of new bandwidth-intensive technologies based on artificial intelligence and virtual reality.
And if certain Internet backbones are now in the process of being decommissioned due to their advanced age, this should not prevent the total international transmission capacity from also continuing to progress over the coming months, whether either due to the forthcoming ignition of new submarine cable networks across the globe or the use of new signal exploitation technologies.