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DE-CIX
Deutsche Commercial Internet Exchange (DE-CIX), [ˈdeːˌkiks] is an Internet Exchange operator headquartered in Frankfurt am Main. The company offers peering, cloud connectivity, and interconnection services at 60 locations in Europe, Africa, North and South America, the Middle East, India, and Southeast Asia. In addition to managing its own IXs, DE-CIX also offers technical operations for third-party exchanges, such as UAE-IX in the United Arab Emirates. DE-CIX is accessible from data centers in over 600 cities worldwide and connects thousands of network operators (carriers), Internet service providers (ISPs), content providers, and corporate networks from more than 100 countries. In terms of data throughput, DE-CIX Frankfurt is one of the largest Internet exchanges in the world. All national and international DE-CIX activities and companies are consolidated under the umbrella of DE-CIX Group AG. DE-CIX employs nearly 250 people from around 35 countries worldwide.
DE-CIX operates Internet exchanges worldwide and offers its customers various interconnection services. Its core business is the provision of comprehensive peering options. Peering allows DE-CIX customers to use the company's data center and carrier-neutral infrastructure to set up comprehensive data exchange and traffic between their networks and the networks of other peering partners (also known as "peers") connected to DE-CIX for a monthly fee. Peering is an alternative to IP transit, where network operators route their data traffic through the network of a larger provider for a fee and on an individual basis depending on the destination. In addition to Internet exchanges specializing in peering, DE-CIX has also been operating Cloud Exchanges at many of its global locations since 2013, enabling DE-CIX customers to connect to over 50 cloud service providers.
The former post office on Mainzer Landstraße DE-CIX was founded in the fall of 1995 by Harald A. Summa and Arnold Nipper, among others, and was originally a project to interconnect the three Internet service providers (ISPs) MAZ Hamburg, EUnet Dortmund, and XLink Karlsruhe. The first location in Frankfurt was in a former telegram post office and had a connection speed of 2 Mbit/s. The post office was chosen as the location because ITENOS, now part of Deutsche Telekom, operated a data center there that was already connected to a European voice network operated by EuroDATA GmbH with 32 Mbit/s fiber optic. Operations were taken over by eco Association of the Internet Industry. In 1997, DE-CIX moved to a new data center operated by Interxion, now Digital Realty, on Hanauer Landstraße in Frankfurt am Main. In 2001, DE-CIX's commercial activities were transferred to DE-CIX Management GmbH, based in Cologne, a wholly owned subsidiary of the eco Association. In the same year, DE-CIX 2 went into operation in Frankfurt to solve the space problems in the old data center and increase reliability through redundancy. The new and old locations were connected by fiber optic cables. Growing Internet traffic and increasing demand for higher reliability led to a third location, which went into operation in January 2004 and was installed at the Telecity Group in Gutleutstraße in Frankfurt am Main. By 2014, DE-CIX's technical infrastructure in Frankfurt was already spread across 18 data centers operated by eight providers, primarily Equinix and Interxion. The largest relocation in DE-CIX's history took place in 2018. Around 15 kilometers of fiber optic cable were laid and the connections of 450 customers were migrated during ongoing operations. The additional location is on the Kleyerstrasse campus in Frankfurt-Gallus. According to its own information, DE-CIX Frankfurt now handles a large proportion of German peering traffic and is one of the largest Internet exchanges in the world in terms of the number of connected networks (2nd place), peak traffic (2nd place), and average data throughput (2nd place).
The DE-CIX Frankfurt Internet exchange point is redundantly housed in over 50 data centers, including those of Digital Realty and Equinix in Frankfurt am Main. In addition, DE-CIX currently operates its own exchange points in Germany in Hamburg (since 2002), Munich (since 2008), Düsseldorf (since 2015), and Leipzig (since 2022) and other Internet exchanges together with partners in the Ruhr area (Ruhr-CIX, since 2021). DE-CIX also engages in partnerships with other IX operators in order to extend its geographical coverage to those locations, for example in Berlin (Partner IX operated by BCIX), The United Arab Emirates Internet Exchange (UAE-IX) in Dubai, which went live in 2012 in cooperation with telecommunications company and data center operator du/Datamena, was the first Internet exchange operated by DE-CIX for partners and also the first Internet exchange operated by DE-CIX outside Germany. In fall 2013, DE-CIX expanded to North America and opened a new location in New York, which went live in 2014. The following year, the opening of DE-CIX Istanbul, DE-CIX Marseille, and DE-CIX Palermo was announced. With locations in Marseille and Palermo, as well as the opening of another location in Madrid in 2016, DE-CIX established several new Internet exchanges in Southern Europe. In the same year, a second DE-CIX location was opened in Dallas, North America. Since October 2018, the company has also been represented in Moscow (Partner IX operated by MSK-IX). St. Petersburg (Partner IX powered by MSK-IX) followed in early 2020. At the end of 2018, DE-CIX Lisbon became another Internet exchange point in Southern Europe. After DE-CIX had already opened an Internet exchange in Mumbai (Mumbai-IX) in 2017, the company announced the expansion of its presence in India in 2019. The joint venture DE-CIX Interwire Internet Services Ltd. launched three new locations in Delhi, Kolkata, and Chennai under the DE-CIX brand. Later in the year, the announcement of locations in Johor Bahru and Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia followed – the first DE-CIX locations in the Southeast Asia region. The presence there was expanded in January 2020 to include the Singapore location. Also in 2020, the SEECIX internet exchange point operated by DE-CIX in Athens was announced, followed by DE-CIX Barcelona. At the end of the year, DE-CIX also expanded its presence in North America with two locations in Richmond and Chicago. In February 2021, it was announced that DE-CIX would operate an Internet exchange for a local telecom provider in Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei (Borneo-IX powered by DE-CIX), in cooperation with the state-owned company Unified National Networks. In the second half of 2021, the westernmost DE-CIX location was opened in Phoenix, Arizona, and the company announced its expansion into Northern Europe. Five new locations were established: Copenhagen and Esbjerg in Denmark, Oslo and Kristiansand in Norway, and Helsinki in Finland. In March 2022, a partnership was agreed with IRAQ-IXP, under which DE-CIX took over the operation of an Internet exchange in Baghdad. In the same year, DE-CIX entered into a cooperation agreement with the Aqaba Digital Hub project in Jordan to set up the AqabaIX Internet exchange. DE-CIX is now also represented in Africa through partnerships: Beginning at the end of 2022, the company set up the Africa Cloud Interconnection Exchange (AF-CIX powered by DE-CIX) in a data center operated by Rack Centre in Lagos (Nigeria) and the Africa Congo Internet Exchange ACIX interconnection platform with the Internet service and hosting provider UNITED S.A. in Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of Congo). At the beginning of 2025, DE-CIX, in cooperation with the Qatari telecommunications company Ooredoo, took an internet exchange into operation in Doha, the Doha-IX. In March 2025, DE-CIX also opened its first locations in South America: DE-CIX São Paulo and DE-CIX Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. Other DE-CIX locations worldwide include Amsterdam, Bengaluru, Bucharest (Partner IX operated by InterLAN-IX), Fujairah, Houston, Hyderabad, Karachi, Manila (Partner IX operated by GetaFIX), Mexico City, Moscow (Partner IX operated by MSK-IX), Osaka, Penang, Prague (Partner IX operated by NIX.CZ), Querétaro, Saint Petersburg (Partner IX operated by MSK-IX), Seattle, Sofia (Partner IX operated by BIX.BG), Tokyo, and Warsaw (Partner IX operated by Thinx IX). DE-CIX now offers its peering, cloud connectivity, and interconnection services at a total of 60 locations in Europe, Africa, North and South America, the Middle East, India, and Southeast Asia.
In September 2025, DE-CIX announced its Space-IX initiative, a project working towards building Internet Exchanges in space, specifically for satellite networks in low Earth orbit. In this context, in the same year, DE-CIX also announced a collaboration with the German Aerospace Center (DLR) to research how laser-based communications can improve satellite connectivity, as part of the European Space Agency’s OFELIAS project.
Since 2013, DE-CIX has been relying on its own Ethernet-based platform, DE-CIX Apollon, for the technical operation of its Internet exchanges and interconnection services, particularly in the peering segment. The main technical component of DE-CIX Apollon for the IP network is Nokia routers from the 7750 SR-s and SR series, which DE-CIX uses worldwide. SR1-FP4 routers are installed at smaller locations (e.g., Lisbon), and SR-14s with FP5 line cards are used at larger locations (e.g., in the data centers of Digital Realty and Equinix in Frankfurt). DE-CIX's optical infrastructure consists of hardware from Smart optics, optics from Flexoptix and Nokia, as well as ROADM technology from Nokia (only in New York). The data centers in which DE-CIX has set up the Apollon infrastructure are connected to each other within a large area (metropolitan region or location) via fiber optic cables. DE-CIX uses path- and exchange-redundant fiber optic connections that are as short as possible to minimize latency (round trip delay). DE-CIX also operates two redundant route servers at each of its Internet exchanges, enabling peering partners to exchange data quickly and easily. To this end, DE-CIX primarily uses the open-source products BIRD and, in the future, OpenBGPD. DE-CIX relies on the open-source tool Alice-LG as its looking glass. DE-CIX customers can choose between different capacities when connecting to an Internet exchange. DE-CIX offers various port sizes for this purpose. Smaller Internet exchanges operated by DE-CIX usually only offer 1, 10, or 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GE) ports, while some larger DE-CIX locations have also offered 400 GE ports since 2019. In 2022, DE-CIX also announced that it would expand its technical capacities to 800 GE connections worldwide, starting at its Frankfurt location. Most DE-CIX locations are connected to each other via a global network. For this purpose, redundant network capacities are leased via undersea and terrestrial cables with bandwidths ranging from 10 GE to several hundred. This enables customers worldwide to participate in DE-CIX's peering ecosystems or use cloud on-ramps without their own hardware. In addition, DE-CIX has largely automated the provisioning of its products. Customers can order and configure interconnection services online manually via a portal or via a programming interface. In 2018, DE-CIX became the world's first Internet exchange operator to put a patch robot into operation that can provision and upgrade customer ports. The robot automatically reconnects cables so that no technician needs to set up new connections on site. The DE-CIX robot was named Best Internet Exchange Innovation at the 2018 Global Carrier Awards. The following year, two more patch robots were put into service by DE-CIX. According to its own information, DE-CIX makes around two-thirds of its available capacity available to its customers during normal business operations, while the remaining capacity is used for redundancy and to cater for short-term fluctuations. In addition, customer networks at most DE-CIX locations are protected against DDoS attacks by Blackholing.
DE-CIX is a founding member of the Route Server Support Foundation (RSSF)[26] and of the IX API project launched jointly with AMS-IX, LINX, Digital Realty (formerly Interxion) and EpsilonTEL [27].The RSSF finances the further development of open source tools related to OpenBGPD with the intention of providing two independent software products as route servers at Internet exchanges. The goal of the RSSF is to increase the resilience of route server services. The IX-API project aims to provide a standardized and open programming interface for Internet and cloud exchanges. The programming interface is integrated, for example, in Peering Manager[28]), an open source tool supported by DE-CIX for automatically managing and configuring routers. In addition, DE-CIX is involved in the further development of the Internet infrastructure and participates in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in the development of Internet standards and Requests for Comments (RFCs). Internally, DE-CIX operates its own research and development department, which works on infrastructure issues, publishes technical articles, and participates in scientific conferences. DE-CIX employees are involved in organizations dedicated to the further development of the Internet. For example, Harald A. Summa is a member of the board of the RIPE Network Coordination Centre, an independent non-profit organization that supports the development of the Internet infrastructure in the regions it serves through technical coordination.
Data throughput at DE-CIX Frankfurt has risen steadily over the years. In September 2012, the 2 terabits per second mark was exceeded for the first time, followed by 4 terabits per second in April 2015 and over 6 terabits per second in December 2017. On September 19, 2019, 7 terabits per second were exceeded for the first time before the data throughput rose to over 8 terabits per second for the first time on December 11, 2019. Due to the general restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic, data traffic at DE-CIX grew by a further 10 percent from the beginning/middle of March 2020, with video communication increasing by as much as 50 percent and gaming by 25 percent. There were also increases in social media visits and VPN connections. On December 14, 2022, DE-CIX Frankfurt achieved a data throughput of 14.4 terabits per second and on November 20, 2024, a record high of 18.1 terabits per second. Globally, data traffic at DE-CIX locations has also increased steadily in recent years. Massive video and software downloads are considered to be the main drivers of new data throughput records (traffic peaks). These are typically based on operating system updates and new or updated computer game versions. Streaming live sporting events such as Champions League soccer matches or NFL games in high video quality also requires the processing of large amounts of data. Five of the Internet exchanges operated by DE-CIX worldwide already exchange more than 1 terabit per second of data (DE-CIX Frankfurt, DE-CIX New York, DE-CIX Madrid, DE-CIX Dallas and DE-CIX Mumbai as of March 2025). According to the company's annual report, the connected customer capacity of all global DE-CIX locations amounted to more than 170 terabits at the end of 2024. At the beginning of 2025, more than 4,000 Internet service providers and other organizations from more than 100 countries were connected to DE-CIX Internet exchanges, including virtually all major carriers, content and Internet service providers, and numerous corporate customers.
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DE-CIX
Deutsche Commercial Internet Exchange (DE-CIX), [ˈdeːˌkiks] is an Internet Exchange operator headquartered in Frankfurt am Main. The company offers peering, cloud connectivity, and interconnection services at 60 locations in Europe, Africa, North and South America, the Middle East, India, and Southeast Asia. In addition to managing its own IXs, DE-CIX also offers technical operations for third-party exchanges, such as UAE-IX in the United Arab Emirates. DE-CIX is accessible from data centers in over 600 cities worldwide and connects thousands of network operators (carriers), Internet service providers (ISPs), content providers, and corporate networks from more than 100 countries. In terms of data throughput, DE-CIX Frankfurt is one of the largest Internet exchanges in the world. All national and international DE-CIX activities and companies are consolidated under the umbrella of DE-CIX Group AG. DE-CIX employs nearly 250 people from around 35 countries worldwide.
DE-CIX operates Internet exchanges worldwide and offers its customers various interconnection services. Its core business is the provision of comprehensive peering options. Peering allows DE-CIX customers to use the company's data center and carrier-neutral infrastructure to set up comprehensive data exchange and traffic between their networks and the networks of other peering partners (also known as "peers") connected to DE-CIX for a monthly fee. Peering is an alternative to IP transit, where network operators route their data traffic through the network of a larger provider for a fee and on an individual basis depending on the destination. In addition to Internet exchanges specializing in peering, DE-CIX has also been operating Cloud Exchanges at many of its global locations since 2013, enabling DE-CIX customers to connect to over 50 cloud service providers.
The former post office on Mainzer Landstraße DE-CIX was founded in the fall of 1995 by Harald A. Summa and Arnold Nipper, among others, and was originally a project to interconnect the three Internet service providers (ISPs) MAZ Hamburg, EUnet Dortmund, and XLink Karlsruhe. The first location in Frankfurt was in a former telegram post office and had a connection speed of 2 Mbit/s. The post office was chosen as the location because ITENOS, now part of Deutsche Telekom, operated a data center there that was already connected to a European voice network operated by EuroDATA GmbH with 32 Mbit/s fiber optic. Operations were taken over by eco Association of the Internet Industry. In 1997, DE-CIX moved to a new data center operated by Interxion, now Digital Realty, on Hanauer Landstraße in Frankfurt am Main. In 2001, DE-CIX's commercial activities were transferred to DE-CIX Management GmbH, based in Cologne, a wholly owned subsidiary of the eco Association. In the same year, DE-CIX 2 went into operation in Frankfurt to solve the space problems in the old data center and increase reliability through redundancy. The new and old locations were connected by fiber optic cables. Growing Internet traffic and increasing demand for higher reliability led to a third location, which went into operation in January 2004 and was installed at the Telecity Group in Gutleutstraße in Frankfurt am Main. By 2014, DE-CIX's technical infrastructure in Frankfurt was already spread across 18 data centers operated by eight providers, primarily Equinix and Interxion. The largest relocation in DE-CIX's history took place in 2018. Around 15 kilometers of fiber optic cable were laid and the connections of 450 customers were migrated during ongoing operations. The additional location is on the Kleyerstrasse campus in Frankfurt-Gallus. According to its own information, DE-CIX Frankfurt now handles a large proportion of German peering traffic and is one of the largest Internet exchanges in the world in terms of the number of connected networks (2nd place), peak traffic (2nd place), and average data throughput (2nd place).
The DE-CIX Frankfurt Internet exchange point is redundantly housed in over 50 data centers, including those of Digital Realty and Equinix in Frankfurt am Main. In addition, DE-CIX currently operates its own exchange points in Germany in Hamburg (since 2002), Munich (since 2008), Düsseldorf (since 2015), and Leipzig (since 2022) and other Internet exchanges together with partners in the Ruhr area (Ruhr-CIX, since 2021). DE-CIX also engages in partnerships with other IX operators in order to extend its geographical coverage to those locations, for example in Berlin (Partner IX operated by BCIX), The United Arab Emirates Internet Exchange (UAE-IX) in Dubai, which went live in 2012 in cooperation with telecommunications company and data center operator du/Datamena, was the first Internet exchange operated by DE-CIX for partners and also the first Internet exchange operated by DE-CIX outside Germany. In fall 2013, DE-CIX expanded to North America and opened a new location in New York, which went live in 2014. The following year, the opening of DE-CIX Istanbul, DE-CIX Marseille, and DE-CIX Palermo was announced. With locations in Marseille and Palermo, as well as the opening of another location in Madrid in 2016, DE-CIX established several new Internet exchanges in Southern Europe. In the same year, a second DE-CIX location was opened in Dallas, North America. Since October 2018, the company has also been represented in Moscow (Partner IX operated by MSK-IX). St. Petersburg (Partner IX powered by MSK-IX) followed in early 2020. At the end of 2018, DE-CIX Lisbon became another Internet exchange point in Southern Europe. After DE-CIX had already opened an Internet exchange in Mumbai (Mumbai-IX) in 2017, the company announced the expansion of its presence in India in 2019. The joint venture DE-CIX Interwire Internet Services Ltd. launched three new locations in Delhi, Kolkata, and Chennai under the DE-CIX brand. Later in the year, the announcement of locations in Johor Bahru and Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia followed – the first DE-CIX locations in the Southeast Asia region. The presence there was expanded in January 2020 to include the Singapore location. Also in 2020, the SEECIX internet exchange point operated by DE-CIX in Athens was announced, followed by DE-CIX Barcelona. At the end of the year, DE-CIX also expanded its presence in North America with two locations in Richmond and Chicago. In February 2021, it was announced that DE-CIX would operate an Internet exchange for a local telecom provider in Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei (Borneo-IX powered by DE-CIX), in cooperation with the state-owned company Unified National Networks. In the second half of 2021, the westernmost DE-CIX location was opened in Phoenix, Arizona, and the company announced its expansion into Northern Europe. Five new locations were established: Copenhagen and Esbjerg in Denmark, Oslo and Kristiansand in Norway, and Helsinki in Finland. In March 2022, a partnership was agreed with IRAQ-IXP, under which DE-CIX took over the operation of an Internet exchange in Baghdad. In the same year, DE-CIX entered into a cooperation agreement with the Aqaba Digital Hub project in Jordan to set up the AqabaIX Internet exchange. DE-CIX is now also represented in Africa through partnerships: Beginning at the end of 2022, the company set up the Africa Cloud Interconnection Exchange (AF-CIX powered by DE-CIX) in a data center operated by Rack Centre in Lagos (Nigeria) and the Africa Congo Internet Exchange ACIX interconnection platform with the Internet service and hosting provider UNITED S.A. in Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of Congo). At the beginning of 2025, DE-CIX, in cooperation with the Qatari telecommunications company Ooredoo, took an internet exchange into operation in Doha, the Doha-IX. In March 2025, DE-CIX also opened its first locations in South America: DE-CIX São Paulo and DE-CIX Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. Other DE-CIX locations worldwide include Amsterdam, Bengaluru, Bucharest (Partner IX operated by InterLAN-IX), Fujairah, Houston, Hyderabad, Karachi, Manila (Partner IX operated by GetaFIX), Mexico City, Moscow (Partner IX operated by MSK-IX), Osaka, Penang, Prague (Partner IX operated by NIX.CZ), Querétaro, Saint Petersburg (Partner IX operated by MSK-IX), Seattle, Sofia (Partner IX operated by BIX.BG), Tokyo, and Warsaw (Partner IX operated by Thinx IX). DE-CIX now offers its peering, cloud connectivity, and interconnection services at a total of 60 locations in Europe, Africa, North and South America, the Middle East, India, and Southeast Asia.
In September 2025, DE-CIX announced its Space-IX initiative, a project working towards building Internet Exchanges in space, specifically for satellite networks in low Earth orbit. In this context, in the same year, DE-CIX also announced a collaboration with the German Aerospace Center (DLR) to research how laser-based communications can improve satellite connectivity, as part of the European Space Agency’s OFELIAS project.
Since 2013, DE-CIX has been relying on its own Ethernet-based platform, DE-CIX Apollon, for the technical operation of its Internet exchanges and interconnection services, particularly in the peering segment. The main technical component of DE-CIX Apollon for the IP network is Nokia routers from the 7750 SR-s and SR series, which DE-CIX uses worldwide. SR1-FP4 routers are installed at smaller locations (e.g., Lisbon), and SR-14s with FP5 line cards are used at larger locations (e.g., in the data centers of Digital Realty and Equinix in Frankfurt). DE-CIX's optical infrastructure consists of hardware from Smart optics, optics from Flexoptix and Nokia, as well as ROADM technology from Nokia (only in New York). The data centers in which DE-CIX has set up the Apollon infrastructure are connected to each other within a large area (metropolitan region or location) via fiber optic cables. DE-CIX uses path- and exchange-redundant fiber optic connections that are as short as possible to minimize latency (round trip delay). DE-CIX also operates two redundant route servers at each of its Internet exchanges, enabling peering partners to exchange data quickly and easily. To this end, DE-CIX primarily uses the open-source products BIRD and, in the future, OpenBGPD. DE-CIX relies on the open-source tool Alice-LG as its looking glass. DE-CIX customers can choose between different capacities when connecting to an Internet exchange. DE-CIX offers various port sizes for this purpose. Smaller Internet exchanges operated by DE-CIX usually only offer 1, 10, or 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GE) ports, while some larger DE-CIX locations have also offered 400 GE ports since 2019. In 2022, DE-CIX also announced that it would expand its technical capacities to 800 GE connections worldwide, starting at its Frankfurt location. Most DE-CIX locations are connected to each other via a global network. For this purpose, redundant network capacities are leased via undersea and terrestrial cables with bandwidths ranging from 10 GE to several hundred. This enables customers worldwide to participate in DE-CIX's peering ecosystems or use cloud on-ramps without their own hardware. In addition, DE-CIX has largely automated the provisioning of its products. Customers can order and configure interconnection services online manually via a portal or via a programming interface. In 2018, DE-CIX became the world's first Internet exchange operator to put a patch robot into operation that can provision and upgrade customer ports. The robot automatically reconnects cables so that no technician needs to set up new connections on site. The DE-CIX robot was named Best Internet Exchange Innovation at the 2018 Global Carrier Awards. The following year, two more patch robots were put into service by DE-CIX. According to its own information, DE-CIX makes around two-thirds of its available capacity available to its customers during normal business operations, while the remaining capacity is used for redundancy and to cater for short-term fluctuations. In addition, customer networks at most DE-CIX locations are protected against DDoS attacks by Blackholing.
DE-CIX is a founding member of the Route Server Support Foundation (RSSF)[26] and of the IX API project launched jointly with AMS-IX, LINX, Digital Realty (formerly Interxion) and EpsilonTEL [27].The RSSF finances the further development of open source tools related to OpenBGPD with the intention of providing two independent software products as route servers at Internet exchanges. The goal of the RSSF is to increase the resilience of route server services. The IX-API project aims to provide a standardized and open programming interface for Internet and cloud exchanges. The programming interface is integrated, for example, in Peering Manager[28]), an open source tool supported by DE-CIX for automatically managing and configuring routers. In addition, DE-CIX is involved in the further development of the Internet infrastructure and participates in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in the development of Internet standards and Requests for Comments (RFCs). Internally, DE-CIX operates its own research and development department, which works on infrastructure issues, publishes technical articles, and participates in scientific conferences. DE-CIX employees are involved in organizations dedicated to the further development of the Internet. For example, Harald A. Summa is a member of the board of the RIPE Network Coordination Centre, an independent non-profit organization that supports the development of the Internet infrastructure in the regions it serves through technical coordination.
Data throughput at DE-CIX Frankfurt has risen steadily over the years. In September 2012, the 2 terabits per second mark was exceeded for the first time, followed by 4 terabits per second in April 2015 and over 6 terabits per second in December 2017. On September 19, 2019, 7 terabits per second were exceeded for the first time before the data throughput rose to over 8 terabits per second for the first time on December 11, 2019. Due to the general restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic, data traffic at DE-CIX grew by a further 10 percent from the beginning/middle of March 2020, with video communication increasing by as much as 50 percent and gaming by 25 percent. There were also increases in social media visits and VPN connections. On December 14, 2022, DE-CIX Frankfurt achieved a data throughput of 14.4 terabits per second and on November 20, 2024, a record high of 18.1 terabits per second. Globally, data traffic at DE-CIX locations has also increased steadily in recent years. Massive video and software downloads are considered to be the main drivers of new data throughput records (traffic peaks). These are typically based on operating system updates and new or updated computer game versions. Streaming live sporting events such as Champions League soccer matches or NFL games in high video quality also requires the processing of large amounts of data. Five of the Internet exchanges operated by DE-CIX worldwide already exchange more than 1 terabit per second of data (DE-CIX Frankfurt, DE-CIX New York, DE-CIX Madrid, DE-CIX Dallas and DE-CIX Mumbai as of March 2025). According to the company's annual report, the connected customer capacity of all global DE-CIX locations amounted to more than 170 terabits at the end of 2024. At the beginning of 2025, more than 4,000 Internet service providers and other organizations from more than 100 countries were connected to DE-CIX Internet exchanges, including virtually all major carriers, content and Internet service providers, and numerous corporate customers.
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