How Submarine Cables Are Redrawing the Colocation Map

Since the 1800s, undersea communications cables linked the world’s major coastal cities and shipping ports. They followed the course of global commerce. Now global commerce is changing course, and the newest submarine cables are following.

The geographic placement of data centers depends nowadays on the perfect alignment of a number of coincident factors: practical, cultural, political, commercial, financial and, more often these days, climatological. They’re part of why Reston, Virginia, and Hillsboro, Oregon, have quickly become the hubs for U.S.-based e-commerce. Now, the providers of global content and services have decided it’s in their own best interests to link their overseas facilities to one another, by their own means. As a result, within just the last five years, Facebook, Amazon, Google and Microsoft have emerged as the new kingpins of submarine cables.

Their objective is not to seek out centers of interconnectivity with varieties of options, so much as to reduce the cost of linking their own facilities together.

In this in-depth special report, find out why the submarine cable world was overdue for an overhaul; how data center operators and colo providers are partnering with telecom firms to establish interconnectivity points in places that are favorable in terms of both climate and taxes; and what it means for the future of international terrestrial communications.

Download the free report.