Tag Archives: hyperscalers

The Growing Splinternet

From FlaticonThe term splinternet refers to Internet service in a country that controls or censors content available to citizens. The best-known example of a splinternet is the Great Firewall of China. While there is a lot of different software and platforms available to Chinese citizens, many web platforms from outside the country are blocked, and citizens all understand that anything they do on the Internet can be monitored.  China is not the only splinternet. For example, the Russian government restricts Internet access to only  approved sites in a lot of the country.

Iran has always controlled the Internet to some extent, but in recent months has entered the realm of full splinternet. This started with public protests against the government. Citizens could communicate inside the country, but only through government-controlled apps. The government blocked citizens from viewing foreign websites and from sending pictures and videos outside the country.

Internet advocates are warning that the splinternet is spreading. Wired recently had an article that says that China is now exporting the technology that support their censorship techniques for the Great Firewall. The article claims the technology has been exported to multiple governments around the world. This is going to make it a lot easier for smaller countries to achieve the same control of the web as achieved by China.

AI is making it a lot easier for governments to track what people are doing on the web. AI can also be an effective tool for blocking websites and can help a government to identify people using any software that does an end run around web restrictions. In the past, people found ways around government restrictions. I recall that protesters in Hong Kong became adept at coordinating and communicating by setting up ad hoc networks that bypassed government monitoring.

While not exactly a splinternet movement, there is a significant effort in Europe to create telecom and cloud infrastructure that is purely European. There is a lot of demand from businesses for cloud solutions that are independent and fully within European control. As much as anything, this movement is an attempt to avoid the large U.S. software companies that largely control the web around the world.

An example of this new direction is the consortium recently announced by Orange, Deutsche Telekom, Telefónica, TIM, and Vodafone, They have launched the European Edge Continuum, which allows customers to deploy applications that are restricted to only use the networks of the five providers. This is nearly the opposite of the approach being taken in the U.S., where ISPs hand traffic to hyperscalers that route traffic in ways that are unknown to the ISPs and users.

It’s becoming obvious that there is a downside in this country to a web that relies on a handful of hyperscalers. Corporations are increasingly frustrated when they experience major outages due to software problems in distant data centers that are out of their reach and control.

The trends are not encouraging. It’s hard to think there won’t be an increase in splinternet-like activities from governments around the world. When that’s coupled with people and corporations that want to minimize the use of giant hyperscalers, it looks like a further segmentation of the concept of an open web.

The Growth of Backhaul Data

Zayo recently released a report that talks about the boom in backbone data usage in the country. For any readers who don’t know Zayo, it provides fiber connections for large data users and is one of the major companies that carry data between cities and across the country.

One component of backbone data is the accumulated usage of residential and small business broadband customers. We learned recently from OpenVault that residential and small business data usage grew 18% from 2023 to 2024. The average total usage per customer per month grew from 606 gigabytes at the end of the first quarter of 2023 to 663 gigabytes at the end of the first quarter of 2024. Zayo reports that data usage on fiber backbones grew far faster than the 18% that came from individual broadband users.

Zayo cited the following statistics:

  • Long-haul dark fiber sales were up 52% from 2023 to 2024. Carriers buy dark fiber when they want to send a large amount of data.
  • Wavelength capacity grew by 280% from 2020 to 2024. A wavelength represents the full bandwidth available from a band of light on a fiber. Zayo says that sales of 400 GB wavelengths accounted for more bandwidth than all sales from 10 GB and 100 GB connections in 2024.
  • Large buyers are buying the majority of new bandwidth. Zayo says that hyperscalers and carriers purchased 91% of dark fiber sales and 67% of all wavelength sales since 2020. Hyperscalers are large cloud users like Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

Zayo says that AI traffic accounts for a lot of the new backbone data usage. The report discusses how AI data center usage in new markets is. For example, data sales in Memphis increased by 4,300% in 2024 and data sales in Salt Lake City grow 348%, both due to new AI data centers.

Zayo describes an interesting history of backhaul bandwidth. The report says that backbone bandwidth started growing faster than the bandwidth used by homes around 2007 due to the migration of data to the cloud. Large companies began storing data in data centers instead of locally as a way to protect data. Over time, a lot of the functions used by homes and businesses also migrated to the cloud as the common applications we all use moved to data centers instead of being stored only on people’s computers.

Zayo uses the term “distributed era” to describe the period that began in 2020 when the pandemic suddenly forced companies to expand networks to include people working from home. The decentralized workforce forced employers to find solutions to safely distribute access to their network to myriad locations.

Zayo coined the term “the intelligence era” for the period starting in 2024 and is characterized by modifying networks to handle the massive increases in data created by AI data centers. The changes are not just from larger bandwidth and include lowering latency and increasing real-time responsiveness to end-users.

The report digs a lot deeper than this blog and includes a  lot of interesting graphs of the detail of bandwidth growth since 2020.