IB Geography 4.3.2 Our Shrinking World and Technological Innovation Notes

Eight Words a Minute in 1866 Replaced Ninety-Eight Words in Sixteen and a Half Hours

1. The first message sent over the 1858 Atlantic telegraph cable ran to ninety-eight words and took sixteen and a half hours to transmit, on the account held by the Engineering and Technology History Wiki.
2. The 1866 cable opened at 8 words a minute and improved quickly to 17 words a minute, on the same source.
3. TeleGeography put worldwide used international bandwidth past 6.4 petabits a second for 2024, in an analysis published on 12 May 2025.
4. The Atlantic is no narrower than it was in 1866, so what changed is the quantity a cable laid across it can carry.
5. These technological drivers of global interaction are studied only in the higher level extension, so a standard level student can meet transport and telecommunications as urban infrastructure in the urban environments option but never this global time-space accounting.

One Atlantic Route, Three Technologies and the Century and a Half Between Them

1. The paddle steamer SS Great Western crossed from Avonmouth to New York between 8 and 23 April 1838 in 15 days and 12 hours, averaging 8.66 knots.
2. RMS Queen Mary took the westbound Blue Riband in August 1938 with 3 days, 21 hours and 48 minutes at 30.99 knots on the standard course from Bishop Rock to Ambrose Light.
3. SS United States cut that to 3 days, 12 hours and 12 minutes in July 1952 at 34.51 knots on the same course.
4. British Airways Concorde G-BOAD flew New York to London in 2 hours, 52 minutes and 59 seconds on 7 February 1996.
5. Concorde's last scheduled passenger service flew on 24 October 2003, so the fastest crossing on sale today is slower than the fastest crossing on sale in 2003.

More than Six Hundred Submarine Cables Against Satellites' 0.37 Percent of United States International Capacity

1. TeleGeography counted more than 600 active and planned submarine cables in its 2026 frequently asked questions, with over 1.5 million kilometres of cable already in service.
2. The United States Federal Communications Commission puts satellites at 0.37 percent of all United States international capacity, on the figure TeleGeography quotes.
   1. That figure measures installed capacity, so it sets a ceiling on what satellites could carry and leaves their actual traffic unmeasured.
3. A cable is built to a minimum design life of 25 years and is often retired earlier because a newer system carries more for less.
4. The International Cable Protection Committee records roughly 200 cable faults a year worldwide, on data TeleGeography cites.

Bandwidth Demand Grew Fastest Where the Starting Base Was Smallest

1. Used international bandwidth grew at a 32 percent compound annual rate between 2020 and 2024, on TeleGeography's May 2025 analysis.
2. Africa led that growth at more than 40 percent a year over the same four years, while the United States market grew at about 29 percent.
3. A faster percentage rate on a much smaller base still leaves a smaller absolute figure, because growth rates and volumes answer different questions.
4. Rising demand is what pulls new cable investment towards a coast, so a growth figure forecasts building as much as it records use.
5. Africa's 40 percent growth rate has not bought Africa the most new cable, because the 3.7 billion US dollars of announced Asian systems follows the larger absolute base.

Content and Cloud Networks Now Fill the Cables That Telephone Companies Once Filled

1. Content and cloud networks accounted for almost three-quarters of all international bandwidth demand in 2024, on TeleGeography's figures.
2. On the massive trans-Atlantic, trans-Pacific and intra-Asian routes those same networks took at least 80 percent of demand in that year.
3. The firms generating most of that traffic increasingly invest in the cables themselves, so route choice now follows their data centre estates as well as national telecommunications plans.
4. New submarine cables planned to enter service between 2026 and 2029 are worth more than 16 billion US dollars, on TeleGeography's assessment published on 28 April 2026.
5. Data is therefore generated almost everywhere and stored and routed in a short list of places, which is why the map of use and the map of infrastructure do not match.
6. A firm with its own traffic to carry funds the innovation directly, so the buyer and the user of new capacity are now often the same company.
7. TeleGeography expects the biggest surge on any single intercontinental route to fall on the trans-Pacific, where Google and Meta led cables and several other systems will together drive over 3 billion US dollars of that spending.

Three Routes Carry the Heaviest Bandwidth and the Others Carry Less

1. TeleGeography's May 2025 analysis calls the trans-Atlantic, the trans-Pacific and the intra-Asian routes the massive ones, so the heaviest flows run across the North Atlantic, across the North Pacific and within Asia.
2. The same analysis calls Europe to East Asia and Europe to sub-Saharan Africa smaller routes still driven by internet backbone demand.
3. Two regions can therefore each sit on a massive route and still exchange little with one another, which is the pattern a flow measure reveals.

Four Cable Breaks in March 2024 Priced a Route with No Alternative

1. Four cables serving West Africa failed on 14 March 2024: ACE, SAT-3, WACS and MainOne, on the Internet Society's outage report of April 2024.
2. The report attributes the breaks to a suspected underwater rock slide off the coast of Côte d'Ivoire.
3. Thirteen African countries on the West African seaboard lost connectivity as a result, on the same report.
4. SAT-3 was fully restored on 6 April, ACE between 4 and 14 April, WACS between 25 April and 5 May, and MainOne between 5 and 16 May.
5. A single geological event therefore cost some networks two months of degraded service, because the region had no spare route to switch onto.

Latency Is the One Charge That Distance Still Imposes on Data

1. The Hibernia Express cable runs 4,600 kilometres between New York and London and entered service on 15 September 2015.
2. Its operator Hibernia Networks reported an actual tested latency better than 58.95 milliseconds round trip on that route.
3. Glass fibre has a refractive index near 1.47, so light travels at roughly two-thirds of its vacuum speed, which is why route length sets a floor on delay that no equipment can remove.
4. Traffic exchanged locally never enters an international cable, which is the reason an internet exchange point lowers both delay and transit cost.
5. The Internet Society reported the Cotonou Internet Exchange, COTIX, launching with four members at the end of 2024, while the established Rwanda Internet Exchange, RINEX, expanded its operations.

Fifty-Eight Boxes in 1956 and 24,346 in 2023

1. The converted tanker Ideal-X left Newark for Houston on 26 April 1956 carrying 58 containers of 35 feet by 8 feet by 8 feet, on Jean-Paul Rodrigue's account in The Geography of Transport Systems.
2. Rodrigue puts the 1956 cost of loading a medium-sized ship the conventional way at 5.83 US dollars a ton against less than 0.16 dollars a ton for containers.
   1. That comparison prices the loading cost at the quayside, which is one item in the total cost of moving the cargo.
3. The six-ship MSC Irina class was delivered in 2023 at 24,346 TEU a vessel and still holds the size record in the 2026 rankings.

An Agreed Set of Box Dimensions Is What Made Transfer Cheap

1. A container built to one agreed set of dimensions can move from ship to chassis to rail wagon without the cargo being touched.
2. That transfer without handling is what the term intermodal transport names.
3. Incompatible proprietary boxes had forced each shipping company to install handling equipment of its own, so ISO set up technical committee 104 in 1961 to agree one set of dimensions.
4. A quay without gantry cranes and deep water cannot work a container ship at all, so traffic moved to the berths that were rebuilt for the box.
5. Shanghai handled more than 55 million TEU in 2025 and ranked first in the world for the sixteenth consecutive year, on the Shanghai municipal government's release of 7 January 2026.
   1. Shanghai International Port Group put 2025 at 55.06 million TEU, a rise of about 6.9 percent on the 51.51 million the municipal release gives for 2024.

Air Freight Carries Under One Percent of the Weight and Near a Third of the Value

1. IATA reports that air cargo moved 0.8 percent of global trade by weight in 2025 while carrying close to one-third of it by value.
2. The same brief puts the value share at 29.5 percent across the 42-country sample it measures, so the headline third is an estimate around that figure.
3. Cargo tonne-kilometres rose 3.4 percent in 2025 against 2024, with available cargo tonne-kilometres up 3.7 percent, on IATA's release of 29 January 2026.
4. Value density decides the mode, so pharmaceuticals and semiconductors fly on worth while cut flowers fly on perishability.

Rerouting in 2024 Added Far More Sea Distance than Cargo

1. Maritime trade reached 12,720 million tons in 2024 and grew by 2.2 percent, in UNCTAD's Review of Maritime Transport 2025.
2. Container volumes rose by more than 6 percent in the same year to about 170.5 million TEU, on the same review.
3. Distance-adjusted trade reached 66,781 billion ton-miles in 2024, an increase of 5.9 percent.
4. Attacks on vessels in the Red Sea from December 2023 pushed most container lines onto the Cape of Good Hope, which left Suez transits 70 percent below their mid-December 2023 average by June 2024 on UNCTAD's Review of Maritime Transport 2024.
5. Containerized TEU-miles rose by 18.9 percent in that year, which UNCTAD attributes mainly to vessels rerouting away from the Red Sea.
6. Routing a box ship south of the Cape of Good Hope lengthened voyages by about 30 percent on UNCTAD's estimate, which the review credits with an 11 percent increase in overall container TEU-mile demand.
   1. Cargo therefore grew by 6 percent while the sea miles it travelled grew by 19 percent, which is convergence running backwards.

Six Billion Online in 2025, with the Offline Population Concentrated in Poorer Countries

1. ITU estimated 6 billion internet users in 2025, about three-quarters of the world's population, in Facts and Figures 2025 released on 17 November 2025.
2. That estimate leaves 2.2 billion people offline, 96 percent of them in low- and middle-income countries.
3. The online population grew by more than 240 million during 2025, from a revised 5.8 billion in 2024.
4. Internet use reached 94 percent in high-income countries against 23 percent in low-income countries in 2025.
5. ITU put 77 percent of men and 71 percent of women using the internet in that year, a six percentage point gap that averages across very different national ones.
6. Users in high-income countries generated nearly eight times more mobile data than users in low-income countries in 2025, on the same report.

Every Hundred People Hold Ninety-Nine Mobile Broadband Contracts Between Them

1. ITU recorded 99 active mobile broadband subscriptions per 100 inhabitants worldwide in 2025.
2. ITU states plainly that this does not mean everybody has one, because many individuals hold several subscriptions and some subscriptions belong to machines that talk to each other.
3. Africa stood at 56 mobile broadband subscriptions per 100 inhabitants in the same year.
4. Fixed broadband ran at 20 subscriptions per 100 worldwide, 39 per 100 in high-income countries and 0.6 per 100 in low-income countries.
5. A country with almost no fixed line therefore reaches the internet by mobile or not at all, which is what mobile-first leapfrogging describes.
6. 5G subscriptions made up 36 percent of mobile broadband subscriptions globally in 2025, above four in ten across the Americas, Asia-Pacific and Europe.

The Coverage Gap Is Four Percent and the Usage Gap Is Ten Times Larger

1. GSMA reported 4.7 billion people, or 58 percent of the world, using mobile internet on their own device, in its State of Mobile Internet Connectivity 2025 covering 2024.
2. About 300 million people, 4 percent of the world, live outside any mobile broadband coverage on that report, which GSMA calls the coverage gap.
3. 3.1 billion people, about 38 percent of the world, live inside coverage and do not use mobile internet, which GSMA calls the usage gap.
4. Together those give 3.4 billion unconnected in 2024, so the usage gap runs to roughly ten times the coverage gap.
5. ITU's own coverage series put 96 percent of the world within reach of a 3G or better network in 2024, split into 4 percent reaching only 3G, 41 percent reaching 4G and 51 percent reaching 5G.
   1. Building a mast closes the coverage gap and leaves the usage gap untouched, so infrastructure and use are separate problems.

Price Only Means Something Once It Is Set Against Income

1. The median price of ITU's data-only mobile broadband basket fell from 1.5 to 1.4 percent of gross national income per capita in 2025.
2. The Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development set a target of no more than 2 percent of GNI per capita for broadband access in developing countries by 2025.
3. Of the 205 economies with data, 130 met that mobile broadband benchmark on ITU's 2025 figures.
4. Subscribers in lower-middle-income economies spend about seven times more of their income on mobile broadband than those in high-income economies, with the figure for low-income economies nearer 22 times.
5. A tariff quoted in dollars therefore hides the divide that the same tariff quoted as a share of income reveals.

Mobile Money Shows What Use Adds That Coverage Does Not

1. More than 2 trillion US dollars flowed through mobile money accounts worldwide in 2025, on GSMA's State of the Industry Report on Mobile Money 2026.
2. GSMA puts the value transacted in sub-Saharan Africa at 1.4 trillion US dollars of that total.
3. The report counts 2.3 billion registered accounts globally against 593 million accounts active in a 30-day window.
   1. Registered accounts therefore outnumber monthly active accounts by close to four to one, so the larger figure counts sign-ups while the smaller one counts monthly use.
4. Sub-Saharan Africa held 347 million of those active accounts, almost 60 percent of the world total.
5. A payment network built on basic handsets reached households that bank branch networks never reached, which is leapfrogging with a measurable output.

A Convergence Claim Is Checkable Only with a Measure, a Year and a Denominator

1. A shrinking world claim rests on one of four quantities, so the sentence has to say whether it means a distance, a time, a capacity or a flow.
2. Capacity is what has been installed, while flow is what actually moved.

At a 32 Percent Growth Rate a Two-Year-Old Bandwidth Figure Understates the Present

1. Naming the year matters most in telecommunications, where a bandwidth figure two years old sits at roughly three-fifths of the present level at a 32 percent annual growth rate.
2. Cable landing points concentrate international connectivity in specific coastal hubs, so inland places still depend on terrestrial backhaul, market access and political stability.