International Internet Capacity Grows 31% in 2015

Worldwide international Internet capacity growth rates are slowing, a rather familiar pattern in the international capacity business.

Growth rates were about 41 percent in 2011, and 31 percent in 2015. In part, the law of large numbers is at work: it is harder to maintain high growth rates as the installed base gets larger.

Backbone operators deployed 43 Tbps of new capacity in the past year, according to TeleGeography.

African Internet bandwidth grew 41 percent between 2014 and 2015, and 51 percent compounded annually over the last five years, to reach 2.9 Tbps.

Oceania saw the second fastest growth rate of 47 percent per year between 2011 and 2015 to reach 2.1 Tbps, and capacity in Latin America and the Middle East grew 44 percent per year to 20.6 Tbps and 8.4 Tbps, respectively, TeleGeography says.

While international Internet capacity in each of these regions has doubled every two years over the period, growth in Europe and the U.S. and Canada was far slower, at 33 percent compounded annually.

2011-2015 International Bandwidth Growth Rates

Source: TeleGeography