24 January 2023

2022 traffic round-up

Traffic chart

In 2022 a total of 48 exabytes of data traffic was exchanged at our Internet Exchanges. This also resulted in new peaks, including Madrid joining the 1 Terabit club.

DE-CIX Frankfurt 14.4 Tbps

Our flagship exchange, DE-CIX Frankfurt, hit one record after another in 2022. In February we recorded 11 Terabits per second (Tbps) for the first time and we ended the year with over 14 Tbps. The data traffic at peak times rose by 33% in 2021, and there was almost 34 exabytes of data exchanged in Frankfurt alone.

DE-CIX Madrid 1.07 Tbps

In September, DE-CIX Madrid recorded a new traffic peak record of 1 Tbps. This milestone happened on the first day of the Champions League, with the match between Real Madrid and Celtic, as well as between Sevilla and Manchester City. This year, Madrid already had a new peak with traffic hitting 1.1 Tbps

DE CIX Dallas 625 Gbps & UAE-IX 400 Gbps

DE-CIX Dallas almost doubled its data traffic throughput in 2022, passing the 500 Gigabit per second (Gbps) mark and finishing the year at over 600 Gbps. UAE-IX powered by DE-CIX in Dubai, which celebrated its tenth anniversary in November, saw peak traffic rise to almost 400 Gbps on 22 November, coinciding with the World Cup game between Argentina and Saudi Arabia.

132 terabytes of data in a minute

14 December was the day with the highest data throughput of the year. On the evening of the World Cup semi-final between France and Morocco, 132 terabytes of data flowed through the DE-CIX Internet Exchanges in a single minute, giving both New York (1.32 Tbps) and Frankfurt (14.4 Tbps) new traffic records.

Seasonal changes in data traffic

So, football (soccer) has a big impact on data traffic. The peaks during real-life events show how much different areas of life are becoming digitalized. Whether at work with video conferencing or at play streaming sports events or gaming, digital services have become an indispensable part of our everyday life. Our data shows significant differences in when which services were used in different parts of the year.

During the summer months, the bigger exchanges in Frankfurt, New York, and Madrid, for example, saw a significant drop in data traffic generated by video conferencing. In gaming, although aggregate data throughput was highest in the last quarter of the year, there was a rapid month-on-month increase at all three exchanges in June.