Internet traffic over AMS-IX, one of the world’s leading Internet Exchanges, broke through the 9 Terabits per second (Tbps) barrier on 1 November around 7.30 PM. The peak traffic is a new all-time record for the AMS-IX.
The pandemic-related lockdown and containment measures of European governments might play a role in the AMS-IX experiencing significant growth in Internet traffic last year.
A lot of countries have restrictions like an evening clock, closed restaurants and cancelled events, which contributes to people staying at home.
The cold, rainy autumn weather is most probably also a factor since people stay indoors when the weather worsens, stated AMS-IX. From the comfort of their homes, people tend to use more Internet services like video games or video streaming.
Over 875 networks are connected to the Amsterdam interconnection hub, 75% of them are of European origin. During the last couple of months, quite some networks have been upgrading their port capacity to handle their Internet traffic growth.
From 7 to 9 Tbit/s in Less than 1 Year
“This peak underlines the critical role AMS-IX has as digital mainport for Internet traffic across the globe,” said Peter van Burgel, Chief Executive Officer of AMS-IX. “We saw tremendous growth in Internet traffic last year. In December last year, we reached a peak traffic of 7 Terabits per second, and in less than a year we’ve topped this with 2 terabits more. We live in uncertain times, but you can be sure of one thing: Internet traffic is always growing.”
9 Terabits per second accounts for astronomical amounts of data traffic. It would correspond to:
- Simultaneous streaming of 1,800,000 HD (1080p) videos
- 469 hours of HD (1080p) video streaming (2,4 GB) all transmitted in one second
- Simultaneous streaming 360,000 4K videos
- 94 hours of 4K videos (12 GB) all transmitted in one second
- The transmission of a little under 220 millions of typed A4 pages (in 1 second)
- The transmission of almost 195.000 volumes of ‘The Complete Works of William Shakespeare’ (in 1 second)
- The simultaneous streaming of 225 billion typists who can type 300 characters a minute
