The Technology, Media, and Telecommunications sector is usually drawn as three separate industries with three separate earnings calls. It is more useful to think of it as one plumbing system. Media is the water: the data and content we actually want. Telecom is the pipes: the cables, spectrum, and routing that carry it. Technology is the taps: the software and devices that decide when and how the water comes out.
Once you see it this way, a lot of confusing behavior snaps into focus. We used to ration water. Bandwidth and latency were real constraints, so we sent text before images and images before video. Today we frivolously fling videos back and forth without a second thought. Not because the water became free, but because the pipes got wider and the taps got smarter.
01The internet is cables and more cables
It is easy to forget that the pipes are physical. Roughly 95% of intercontinental internet traffic runs through submarine cables lying on the ocean floor, not satellites. When you picture "the cloud," picture instead a bundle of glass strands in the cold dark of the Atlantic. The water analogy keeps that materiality in view: demand may feel infinite, but the pipes are finite, owned, and maintained.
“Demand for data behaves like thirst. It is not that we drink more because we are thirstier. It is that someone kept widening the pipe.”
— Shailin Dhar
This is the base analogy the rest of this blog builds on. When we later talk about ad-tech as sprinklers, or about bots as a leak in the system, we are always pointing back here: water, pipes, taps. Parallel tracking of the three lets you reason about where value, and waste, actually accumulates.
Futureproof TMT
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