International Bandwidth Equalization

Here's a link to an interesting post over at Telegeography titled "International bandwidth demand is centralizing". The figure at the top of the post nicely visualizes the two key messages:

Not surprisingly lit (used) capacity of undersea cables continues to increased at a staggering pace, around 50% year over year. Between Europe and the US, for example, capacity of around 12 Tbit/s was added in the past 5 years. Terabits…

The second point of the figure is that unlike in previous years, bandwidth additions have been pretty much equal across the globe and are no longer focused just between Europe and the US. I would have thought differently with the majority of cloud and video streaming services being operated by US companies. But perhaps not so surprising at all with companies such as Akamai making sure content is not streamed across undersea cables but from a server as close to the user as possible.