Keynote: Global Infrastructure and Layer 3 Interconnection#

Paul Brodsky – TeleGeography

• Why: Market and topology context for the PM's DC/WAN interconnect interest: where subsea capacity, investment, and concentration risk are heading.
• What: Bandwidth volumes still soar even as growth rates moderate (incremental annual demand keeps rising); hyperscalers (Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft) now dominate new cable investment, but carriers remain necessary partners in hard regulatory geographies — and hyperscaler cables will still swap/sell fiber pairs and IRUs. Resilience improves via landing-site and corridor diversity, though connectivity ≠ capacity (82% of the Middle East's used international capacity still terminates in Europe). The US is no longer the sole hub (largest routes: US–LatAm, Europe–ME, Asia–Europe; Miami as the LatAm hub, Marseille/London as Africa's). AI's subsea impact remains unclear — Anthropic's FCC filing says most AI workloads don't touch submarine cables, but dataset movement and spatial-temporal load shifting could turn networks into global compute load balancers. LEO is an access technology that complements, not replaces, subsea backbones (Starlink ~9M subs, large share of constellation capacity stranded at any moment; satellite traffic rides ground stations into Layer 3 interconnection).
• How: TeleGeography's Transport Networks dataset — lease price trends, cable construction costs, ownership analysis.
• Where applicable: Analyst overview, not an operator technique — useful context for interconnect, peering, and capacity planning decisions.