![]() Past cable builders leveraged cable ownership to sell bandwidth, but content providers are building purposefully private cables. ![]() Google and Facebook are heavily invested in submarine cables compared to Amazon and Microsoft. 2016 saw the start of a massive submarine cable boom, and this time, the buyers are content providers - corporations like Facebook, Google, and Amazon. Historically, cables are owned by groups of private companies - mostly telecom providers. All told, there are more than 700,000 miles of submarine cables in use today. These unassuming cables crisscross the ocean floor worldwide, carrying 95–99% of international data over bundles of fiber-optic fibers barely the diameter of a garden hose. If you want to measure the internet in miles, fiber-optic submarine cables are the place to start. Now they’re using those billions to buy up the internet itself - or at least, the submarine cables that make up the Internet backbone. Google makes billions from their cloud platform. ![]() As a result, some graphics below under-represent Microsoft’s cable ownership. Specifically, Microsoft owns pairs (part ownership) on GTT North, GTT Express, and a number of other cables. We have ommited a number of cables where a content provider may be a major capacity buyer or own individual pairs as a smaller stakeholder. Note that this report is focused on cables listed by Telegeography’s open cable data as wholly or partly owned.
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