Interesting chart on the growth of global internet traffic

GLOBAL internet traffic continues to soar, according to new data from TeleGeography, a research firm (see chart). Over the past five years the amount of active capacity on subsea cables has grown threefold, the fastest spurt since the internet went mainstream more than a decade ago. Then, the majority of traffic flowed between America and Europe. Now trans-Atlantic bandwidth accounts for only a quarter of the capacity in use. The fastest growing region for traffic is Asia.

Intra-Asian connections have overtaken trans-Pacific ones, mirroring Asia’s economic “decoupling” from America. New undersea cable links for sub-Saharan Africa have given the continent more connectivity at lower cost.

But much of the increased bandwidth comes not from laying new cables but the easier and cheaper course of upgrading existing ones, by increasing the number of wavelengths on each strand of fibre and increasing the number of bits that can travel on those wavelengths at the same time. This can raise capacity 25-fold. And only an eighth of potential global capacity is actually in use; the rest is idle but ready to be “lit”.

http://www.economist.com/news/international/21571126-new-data-flows-highlight-relative-decline-west-hooking-up?fsrc=rss|int