TeleGeography Blog

I think it happens a lot more often than you think, and current news reporting also skews the perspective one get. Linked from another comment: https://blog.telegeography.com/what-happens-when-submarine-cables-brea… > Cable faults are common. On average, there are over 100 each year. [...] Unintentional damage from fishing vessels and ships dragging anchors account for two-thirds of all cable faults. 100 each year would be one every three days, but of course you don't read about all them in the news. I'm not saying none of the cable breakages are sabotage, I/we don't know. As far as we know, I don't think we have any cases (with or without confession) where we can be 100% it's intentional, at least yet.

Read the linked page, and its infographic. 38% + 25% = 63% ~ "two thirds". There are another 11% caused by "human activity", it's just neither "fishing" (trawler nets) nor "anchorage", but "other", which could even be a keel severing the cable close to shore. https://blog.telegeography.com/hs-fs/hubfs/2017/submarine-cable-map/fa… 74% human caused (38% fishing, 25% anchorage, 11% other) 14% environmental (8% natural, 6% abrasion) 12% neither human nor environmental (6% component failure, 6% other) "Deliberate sabotage and shark bites are exceedingly rare"

It turns out that these incidents are actually incredibly common [1], about once every 3 days. But 'undersea line disrupted temporarily in mundane way' wasn't exactly international news until it could be tied into geopolitics. [1] - https://blog.telegeography.com/what-happens-when-submarine-cables-brea… (telecoms intel service/site)

Traditionally, undersea cables were owned / maintained by telephone companies or partnerships of several. Over time, that morphed to telecoms companies, including dedicated networking companies. They'd run their own stuff on the cables and lease out excess capacity. As big tech has been concentrating and also doing more global networking, and running their own backbones and things, they became heavy users of these cables, and then partners, and now sometimes sole owners. I suspect the actual maritime operations are contracted out. I don't know how accurate this is, but it seems like a good start towards a list of cables where big tech is involved [1] [1] https://blog.telegeography.com/telegeographys-content-providers-submar…

Look at transit prices https://blog.telegeography.com/2021-global-ip-transit-price-trends 1mbps a month is 320 gigabyte so 2TB is 6mbps which costs a whopping 3.6 USD in Hong Kong 1.2 USD elsewhere. Where I am wrong? If you don't want to deal with storage, Backblaze B2 is $5/TB/month and the Bandwidth Alliance will reduce/eliminate the egress costs.

Plenty of providers, depending on how many 10G/40G links you're willing to buy, check out https://blog.telegeography.com/global-ip-transit-prices-decline-pandem… to see how much prices have gone down.

Lots of countries do: https://blog.telegeography.com/liberty-vs-security-the-battle-over-sim… You also have to remember carriers will track the approximate position of a phone with an anonymously-purchased SIM-card, so better not take it home.

what I described above would be at layers 1 and 2 in the OSI model (the cable itself and underlying physical assets) a company like Cogent, HE, they're providing at layer 3 the routers, network engineering, IP space (in many cases, not all, mostly for enterprise customers), and what is known as "IP transit" - transiting a customer's traffic through their network to all of their peers. And maintaining the cost of buying all those inter-city transport circuits to link all of their routers within their AS together. https://www.teliacarrier.com/knowledge-hub/what-is-guides/what-is-ip-t… https://www.thousandeyes.com/learning/techtorials/transit-provider https://blog.telegeography.com/what-is-ip-transit-definition

>averaging 4 gigabits 24x7 is not going to be cheap anywhere A normal upstream (if you were in a colo or some sort of DC) will charge you about $0.50 per meg. So, 4gbps would cost you... $200/mo. [1] I think people don't realize just how much more expensive IaaS providers are. We're literally talking orders of magnitude. [1] https://blog.telegeography.com/outlook-for-ip-transit-prices-in-2018

To put those numbers into standard transit pricing using US-East (AWS): Up to 10 TB / month - $30/Mbps Next 350 TB / month - $16.50/Mbps Traffic within the same Region - $3.50/Mbps Traffic to another region - $6.50/Mbps The outbound traffic starts at $45/Mbps in AsiaPac and $85/Mbps in Latin America. In the US and most of the EU, at >1Gbps (~350TB/mo) volume, transit pricing is well under $1/Mbps. Most of Asia should be under $10/Mbps, and south america is quite a bit higher, but not $70/Mbps. See: https://www.telegeography.com/press/press-releases/2015/09/09/ip-trans… http://blog.telegeography.com/bandwidth-and-ip-pricing-trends-in-15-mi…

There is a company, TeleGeography, that collects data about telecommunications industry. I recently read their recent blog post[1] about undersea cable breaks. To summarize the article: On average, 199 cable faults per year from 2010-2023. Two thirds of these faults are caused by external forces like fishing vessels. Most cable faults are not made public. The preliminary data from 2024 suggests slightly more publicly disclosed faults, but nothing extraordinary. It is hard to detect the physical cause of cable damage. One likely cause is inexperienced crews on poorly maintained ships. Personally, I do not believe all the cable faults in the Baltic sea are pure accidents. Russia (and China) have found the "perfect" way to test how we react and play their games. This testing is nothing new and it has happened before in many forms. It is likely that we have not even noticed some of the testing or they are not made public. [1] https://blog.telegeography.com/is-it-sabotage-unraveling-the-mystery-o…

If I understand the methodology correctly this study seems to penalize unlimited plans quite a lot. In the linked methodology pdf they specify that the price for 1 GB of data for unlimited plans is calculated by dividing by the average data usage per user but limited plans are divided by the limit. For example in Finland almost all plans are unlimited and users regularly use a lot of mobile data. Average monthly use is 34 GB and median 6 GB [0]. The cheapest mobile plan I can find is 9.90€/month for unlimited data at 1 Mbit/s [1]. Dividing it by 6 GB median data use gives $1.95 for 1 GB which is close to the their reported minimum price of $1.75. However if this plan was instead marketed with 100 GB monthly cap they would have divided it by 100 GB instead giving a much cheaper price. [0] https://blog.telegeography.com/finns-lead-the-way-in-mobile-data-usage [1] https://elisa.fi/kauppa/puhelinliittymat

How is this calculated? Because Finland is completely saturated in unlimited data plans and if you don't care for speed, you can get a relatively cheap plan. Elisa (39% market share): unlimited 1 Mbps data for 9.90 euro a month (29.90 euro a month for 150 Mbps). Telia (31% market share): unlimited 0.256 Mbps data for 7.90 euro a month (29.90 euro a month for 150 Mbps). DNA (29% market share): unlimited 1 Mbps data for 12.90 euro a month (29.90 euro a month for 150 Mbps). Moi (part of DNA these days, don't know if it's counted in their 29% or not): unlimited 100 Mbps for 18 euro a month (23 euro a month for 300 Mbps). I think Moi might be the only operator that actually sells fixed data plans (6 euro a month for 4 GB at 100 Mbps). Everyone else just sells unlimited plans at varying levels of speed with the entry-level plans basically handicapped to basically email syncing only. Also, apparently the average monthly data usage for a mobile plan in Finland is 34.3 GB (https://blog.telegeography.com/finns-lead-the-way-in-mobile-data-usage… Probably not going to be hitting that at 0.256 Mbps.