2019 at DE-CIX: Dive with us into new countries, new peaks, and technology innovations

Looking back at an extremely progressive and eventful year at DE-CIX deciding what angle to take and where to start is not so easy. Should we begin with the 8.1 Terabits per second all-time peak traffic and more than 900 connected networks in Frankfurt? The overall connected capacity at DE-CIX IXs of more than 50 Terabits? DE-CIX expanding further by building up new Internet Exchanges in Portugal, India, and Malaysia? With how thankful we are for all our customers, partners, and friends that put their trust in DE-CIX and accompany us on our journey? Let’s see where it takes us if we start at the core: the joint effort and success to grow our interconnection ecosystem, worldwide.

Extending reach on different levels 

2019 at DE-CIX was marked by immense growth, not only in terms of new traffic peaks and extending and upgrading our existing Internet Exchanges, but also in launching new IXs. DE-CIX launched new IXs in Lisbon, Portugal, at three locations in India (Chennai, Dehli, and Kolkata), and at two locations in Malaysia (Johor Bahru and Kuala Lumpur, in partnership with JBIX). In addition, the partnership with MSK-IX was extended; DE-CIX is now also offering peering services in St. Petersburg. 
Multiple new DE-CIX-enabled sites were added at DE-CIX’s IXs in Frankfurt, Munich, Madrid, New York, and Dallas. In addition, major upgrades in capacity were realized; amongst others, two Nokia SR14s were installed in Frankfurt, both with a capacity of up to 648x 100GE access ports, and three more sites were made 100GE ready in New York.

Interconnecting more and more DE-CIX Exchanges 

Madrid, Lisbon, and Palermo were connected to the other already interconnected DE-CIX Exchanges. Networks connected there are now able to peer with all networks that are connected to DE-CIX in Germany (Frankfurt, Hamburg, Munich, Dusseldorf), France (Marseille), Turkey (Istanbul) and the US (New York) – and vice versa. In addition, Marseille and Dubai were connected, with Dubai now offering GlobePEER Remote to Marseille, and also cloud connectivity with the DirectCLOUD service. 

Continuous growth in networks and traffic

Growth in capacity was necessary, given that all DE-CIX IXs are growing constantly. Several IXs passed the 100 Gbit/s peak traffic threshold (Dallas, Istanbul, Dusseldorf), New York reached 500 Gbit/s and Madrid 400 Gbit/s. Five years after its inception, DE-CIX New York has become the #5 Exchange in the U.S., and DE-CIX Dallas ranks among the top 20 Exchanges in the U.S.. At the DE-CIX Frankfurt route servers, more than 200,000 IPv4 prefixes are available, and more than 100,000 at DE-CIX New York.  

Tailored services and technology innovations

In addition to continuous growth in capacity, traffic, and locations, DE-CIX introduced new interconnection services like DirectROUTES, the Microsoft Azure Peering Service, and FlexPOP. And with InterconnectionFLEX, DE-CIX is able to offer enterprises a bundled package of different interconnection services including interconnection consulting.  And while we extended our services, we also introduced new technology: Two more patch robots were installed in Frankfurt, and DE-CIX was the first IX worldwide to offer 400G access technology. 
Together with AMS-IX and LINX, we have developed IX-API, an interface for provisioning services at multiple Internet Exchanges. IX-API supports fully end-to-end automated processes and enables networks to configure, change, and cancel IX services. The DE-CIX API functionality will soon be integrated into the new DE-CIX customer portal that was launched in 2019, making the Service Insights traffic statistics available now for all DE-CIX locations. For all these achievements, from technology innovations to new services and an extensive growth across all of our Exchanges, DE-CIX was once more awarded the Global Carrier Award as Best Internet Exchange 2019. 

Without our customers and partners we would not be where we are  

Without you, all our customers, partners, and friends – without us all together – the Internet would not be what it is today; it would not be as strong as it is today. This is something we can be proud of, together. DE-CIX’s expansion to build up interconnection ecosystems in India and Malaysia would not have been possible without partners in the region; enabling networks to peer in Russia would not have been possible without partners; and growing every single one of DE-CIX Internet Exchanges would not have been possible without all different kind of networks that interconnect at DE-CIX. We want to take this time at the end of the year to thank you for your trust. 

We look forward to celebrating DE-CIX’s 25th anniversary with you in 2020!