A connected world
More than 550,000 miles of undersea fiber-optic cable wrap around the globe to deliver e-mails, Web pages, other electronic communications and phone calls from one continent to another at the speed of light. As cables make landfall, they connect to landing stations that route the voice, data and Internet traffic to domestic networks or forward the signal to another undersea network that carries the data onto their final international destination. Read related article.
Network of cables connecting North America to the rest of the world
Major North American
Internet hub cities
Los Angeles, Miami and New York have the highest international Internet capacity in North America. In 2012, 57 percent of Latin America’s international Internet bandwidth was connected
to Miami.
Note: Land-based networks not shown.
With 68.3 terabits per second (Tbps) of used international bandwidth, Europe has more international network capacity than any other world region. However, the great majority of this bandwidth is used to route Internet, data and voice traffic among the countries of Europe. The U.S. remains the world’s largest interregional Internet hub, with 20.6 Tbps of interregional Internet bandwidth.
In the past decade, the role of the U.S. as a primary hub for routing global Internet traffic has gradually eroded as more localized service providers have opted to connect their networks to other countries and regions. While Latin America still relies heavily on the U.S. for its connection to the world, regions such as Africa and the Middle East now connect mainly to European hubs.
“As regional Internet markets and service providers mature, it makes ever more sense for them to exchange traffic locally or regionally, rather than halfway around the world,” said Alan Mauldin, director at market research firm TeleGeography.
Percent of international Internet bandwidth
connecting to hubs in the U.S.
Percent of international Internet bandwidth
connecting to hubs in Europe.
Percent of all of the
international bandwidth
used in the world was for:
Bandwidth used
for the Internet
For private networks,
such as corporate networks
Total Internet bandwidth,
in terabits, connecting one region to another region of the world.
SOURCE: TeleGeography, Google digital storage calculator.