AMS-IX breaks through 8 Tbps barrier

The new peak traffic is most likely a result of the various quarantine measures of national governments in their effort to contain the spread of the COVID-19 virus. People are forced to stay at home and, as a result, make extra use of digital services. In February, the daily amount of traffic exchanged on the platform was between 48 to 50 Petabyte. However, after the 11th of March – the day that the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic – we can see a steep rise in the amount of internet traffic exchanged over the AMS-IX Amsterdam platform. Currently, the traffic volume accounts for 56 to 58 Petabyte on a daily basis, an increase of 17% compared to the previous month.

The last couple of weeks, a lot of networks have been upgrading their port capacity to handle the traffic growth. Over 875 networks are connected to the Amsterdam interconnection hub, 75% of them being of European origin. Another important factor is the timing. Generally, the data traffic at interconnection platforms like AMS-IX moves in waves and reflects the daily rhythm of Internet usage, beginning at 6 AM and reaching its peak at around 9 in the evening.

8 Terabits per second accounts for astronomical amounts of data traffic. It corresponds to the simultaneous transmission of up to 320.000 videos in 4k HD quality or a data volume of approximately 200 million A4 pages of text, which is roughly 175.000 times the complete works of William Shakespeare.