Connectivity · Backbone Capacity

International Internet Bandwidth

The lit capacity carrying the world’s internet traffic between countries.

• 295 Tbps in 2017 to 1,835 in 2025
• Growth cooled below 20% in 2019
• Lit public-internet capacity, not total demand
• Hyperscalers now fund the new cables

Almost all international internet traffic crosses the ocean floor through a few hundred submarine fibre cables. This tracks the capacity actually lit to carry public internet traffic between countries, as reported by TeleGeography, which is the figure their annual State of the Network report headlines each year. It grew from 295 terabits per second in 2017 to 1,835 in 2025, roughly a sixfold rise, and the compounding has been remarkably steady at around a quarter more capacity each year. A real deceleration came in 2019, flagged by TeleGeography, when annual growth cooled below 20%, its lowest in at least 15 years. On the figures plotted here that step is 18.6%. Every point is a figure TeleGeography stated for that specific year, and the series starts in 2017 because that is where directly stated figures begin. Lit internet bandwidth is kept strictly apart here from the two larger measures it is often conflated with. The cables hold more, since not all the fibre in them is lit, and demand is several times the lit public-internet figure: once you count private enterprise and content-provider networks, used international bandwidth passed 6.4 petabits per second in 2024. The backbone itself is increasingly owned by the hyperscalers, with Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon now funding much of the new cable being laid.

Source: TeleGeography, State of the Network

Download the data: submarine_cables.csv · submarine_cables.json

All curves · The chart is drawn in your browser and needs JavaScript. Every number it plots is in the table above.