CAPACITY
CONNECTION
EDITION THREE: DYNAMICS OF THE SUBMARINE CABLE BANDWIDTH MARKET: EFFECTS OF THE GROWTH IN CLOUD AND DATA CENTERS BY JOHN MAGUIRE
INTRODUCTION
Welcome back to Capacity Connections, Submarine Telecom Forum’s department concerned with commercial aspects of the submarine cable capacity business. In this third article of our series, we are going to look at the commercial effects on our business of continued burgeoning growth in the cloud and data center market. In our first article, we presented a high-level overview of the sector, identifying cloud and data centers as one among a number of a key factors driving subsea bandwidth demand. The expansion of cloud services, the rapid growth in the number of cloud regions and the consequent establishment of increasing numbers of large-scale data centers globally, were identified as key factors driving bandwidth demand. It is a dimension that has come even more sharply into relief considering developments, specifically in the Pacific, in the few short months since that article was written, about which a bit more later. In the second Capacity Connections article, on the evolution of commercialization (and to some extent regulation), in the subsea sector, cloud and data centers were identified as the key driver of growth in bandwidth demand. Simply put, demand
is converging on cloud. So, now let us have a slightly closer look. '
ENVIRONMENT
At the risk of stating the bleeding obvious, but probably made necessary by the preceding remark, it is useful to consider briefly what “the cloud” is—and why it is generally bundled with data centers. There are a plethora of definitions, from the long-pastits-use-before-date “someone else’s computer” to the long and descriptive, the interesting and useful. I have decided to cite the following, in attempt to balance brevity and utility:
“’The cloud’ refers to servers that are accessed over the Internet, and the software and databases that run on those servers. Cloud servers are located in data centers all over the world. By using cloud computing, users and companies do not have to manage physical servers themselves or run software applications on their own machines.”1 We might otherwise, depending on our location and consumer interests, know ‘the cloud’ as amazon. com, AppleTV, Blackberry Messen1 https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/learning/cloud/ what-is-the-cloud/ (The quote is approximately 20% of the definition of “What is Cloud Computing?”)
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