Top all-time · #3912
Resources
Company blog · blog.telegeography.combusinesseconomics
Resources is the company blog at blog.telegeography.com, writing about business and economics. Since 2016, 20 different Hacker News readers have linked it 21 times, most often “What to Know About Fiber’s Role in Ukraine’s Information War”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-30, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (15) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link TeleGeography's posts as industry data: IP transit price trends, mobile data costs by country, and undersea cable fault statistics. Commenters cite them as evidence in bandwidth and cable debates.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 15 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
TeleGeography’s resource center is your hub for telecom intelligence and analysis from the industry’s most trusted experts.
Most-linked posts?
- /what-happens-when-submarine-cables-break2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-01-27
- What to Know About Fiber’s Role in Ukraine’s Information War2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-03-11
- /finns-lead-the-way-in-mobile-data-usage2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-07-10
What Hacker News says?
Plenty of providers, depending on how many 10G/40G links you're willing to buy, check out https://blog.telegeography.com/global-ip-transit-prices-decl... to see how much prices have gone down.
Comment linking /global-ip-transit-prices-decline-pandemic-covid19
on “We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400”Submitted Trans-Pacific Cable Chaos, Shifting Asian Hubs as a story · 117 points
HN discussionIf I understand the methodology correctly this study seems to penalize unlimited plans quite a lot. In the linked methodology pdf they specify that the price for 1 GB of data for unlimited plans is calculated by dividing by the average data usage per user but limited plans are divided by the limit. For example in Finland almost all plans are unlimited and users regularly use a lot of mobile data. Average monthly use…
Comment linking /finns-lead-the-way-in-mobile-data-usage
on “The cost of 1GB of mobile data in 228 countries (Feb 2020)”Submitted A decade of visualized submarine cable maps as a story · 5 points
HN discussion>averaging 4 gigabits 24x7 is not going to be cheap anywhere A normal upstream (if you were in a colo or some sort of DC) will charge you about $0.50 per meg. So, 4gbps would cost you... $200/mo. [1] I think people don't realize just how much more expensive IaaS providers are. We're literally talking orders of magnitude. [1] https://blog.telegeography.com/outlook-for-ip-transit-prices...
Comment linking /outlook-for-ip-transit-prices-in-2018
on “Apple downloads ~45 TB of models per day from our S3 bucket”Submitted Frequently Asked Questions: Submarine Cables 101 as a story · 4 points
HN discussionLook at transit prices https://blog.telegeography.com/2021-global-ip-transit-price-... 1mbps a month is 320 gigabyte so 2TB is 6mbps which costs a whopping 3.6 USD in Hong Kong 1.2 USD elsewhere. Where I am wrong? If you don't want to deal with storage, Backblaze B2 is $5/TB/month and the Bandwidth Alliance will reduce/eliminate the egress costs.
Comment linking /2021-global-ip-transit-price-trends
on “Vimeo: “We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube.””Submitted What to Know About Fiber’s Role in Ukraine’s Information War as a story · 1 points
HN discussionLots of countries do: https://blog.telegeography.com/liberty-vs-security-the-battl... You also have to remember carriers will track the approximate position of a phone with an anonymously-purchased SIM-card, so better not take it home.
Comment linking /liberty-vs-security-the-battle-over-sim-registration
on “Mimicking a device is becoming almost impossible”Submitted What to Know About Fiber’s Role in Ukraine’s Information War as a story · 1 points
HN discussionTraditionally, undersea cables were owned / maintained by telephone companies or partnerships of several. Over time, that morphed to telecoms companies, including dedicated networking companies. They'd run their own stuff on the cables and lease out excess capacity. As big tech has been concentrating and also doing more global networking, and running their own backbones and things, they became heavy users of these c…
Comment linking /telegeographys-content-providers-submarine-cable-holdings-list
on “Facebook building subsea cable that will encompass the world”Submitted Retail International Call Revenues Down to $64B in 2019 as a story · 1 points
HN discussionhttps://blog.telegeography.com/does-70-of-the-worlds-interne...
Comment linking /does-70-of-the-worlds-internet-traffic-flow-through-virginia
on “Submarine Cable Map”There is a company, TeleGeography, that collects data about telecommunications industry. I recently read their recent blog post[1] about undersea cable breaks. To summarize the article: On average, 199 cable faults per year from 2010-2023. Two thirds of these faults are caused by external forces like fishing vessels. Most cable faults are not made public. The preliminary data from 2024 suggests slightly more publicl…
Comment linking /is-it-sabotage-unraveling-the-mystery-of-undersea-cable-breaks
on “Sweden Investigates New Cable Break Under Baltic Sea”To put those numbers into standard transit pricing using US-East (AWS): Up to 10 TB / month - $30/Mbps Next 350 TB / month - $16.50/Mbps Traffic within the same Region - $3.50/Mbps Traffic to another region - $6.50/Mbps The outbound traffic starts at $45/Mbps in AsiaPac and $85/Mbps in Latin America. In the US and most of the EU, at >1Gbps (~350TB/mo) volume, transit pricing is well under $1/Mbps. Most of Asia shoul…
Comment linking /bandwidth-and-ip-pricing-trends-in-15-minutes
on “What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP”> I'm Finnish. I don't recall ever hearing about a cable being cut in the Baltic Sea before 2022 I'm Swedish, if that matters, and recall reading about (accidental) cable breakages all the way back to at least 2010 sometime. As mentioned elsewhere, there are between 100-200 cable breakages annually > Do cables break? > Yes! Cable faults are common. On average, there are over 100 each year. > Unintentional damage fro…
Comment linking /what-happens-when-submarine-cables-break
on “'Shadow fleets' and sabotage: are Europe's undersea cables under attack?”Read the linked page, and its infographic. 38% + 25% = 63% ~ "two thirds". There are another 11% caused by "human activity", it's just neither "fishing" (trawler nets) nor "anchorage", but "other", which could even be a keel severing the cable close to shore. https://blog.telegeography.com/hs-fs/hubfs/2017/submarine-ca... 74% human caused (38% fishing, 25% anchorage, 11% other) 14% environmental (8% natural, 6% abra…
Comment linking /hs-fs/hubfs/2017/submarine-cable-map/faq-graphics/causes-of-cable-faults.png
on “Sweden Seizes Ship Suspected of Baltic Sea 'Sabotage'”I think it happens a lot more often than you think, and current news reporting also skews the perspective one get. Linked from another comment: https://blog.telegeography.com/what-happens-when-submarine-c... > Cable faults are common. On average, there are over 100 each year. [...] Unintentional damage from fishing vessels and ships dragging anchors account for two-thirds of all cable faults. 100 each year would be…
Comment linking /what-happens-when-submarine-cables-break
on “Sweden Seizes Ship Suspected of Baltic Sea 'Sabotage'”It turns out that these incidents are actually incredibly common [1], about once every 3 days. But 'undersea line disrupted temporarily in mundane way' wasn't exactly international news until it could be tied into geopolitics. [1] - https://blog.telegeography.com/what-happens-when-submarine-c... (telecoms intel service/site)
Comment linking /what-happens-when-submarine-cables-break
on “Sweden Seizes Ship Suspected of Baltic Sea 'Sabotage'”what I described above would be at layers 1 and 2 in the OSI model (the cable itself and underlying physical assets) a company like Cogent, HE, they're providing at layer 3 the routers, network engineering, IP space (in many cases, not all, mostly for enterprise customers), and what is known as "IP transit" - transiting a customer's traffic through their network to all of their peers. And maintaining the cost of buy…
Comment linking /what-is-ip-transit-definition
on “Map of the Internet”How is this calculated? Because Finland is completely saturated in unlimited data plans and if you don't care for speed, you can get a relatively cheap plan. Elisa (39% market share): unlimited 1 Mbps data for 9.90 euro a month (29.90 euro a month for 150 Mbps). Telia (31% market share): unlimited 0.256 Mbps data for 7.90 euro a month (29.90 euro a month for 150 Mbps). DNA (29% market share): unlimited 1 Mbps data f…
Comment linking /finns-lead-the-way-in-mobile-data-usage
on “What Does 1GB of Mobile Data Cost in Every Country?”
