26 March 2020

Internet usage continues to surge

At DE-CIX, we continue to see a surge in Internet usage and in data traffic. Compared to last week, we have seen an increase in Frankfurt in variety of areas – video conferencing especially is in increasing demand as a result of the ever-growing number of people all around the world working from home. Social media usage is on the increase as is online and cloud gaming, which peaked last Thursday. 

Other DE-CIX locations like Hamburg and Dubai have also seen significant increase in daily average traffic – 30 percent and 15 percent respectfully. In Madrid the number of users of video conferencing has also doubled, and there has been a 30 percent rise in online and cloud gaming. 

The statistics from Frankfurt this week are:

  • 100 percent rise in video conferencing compared to before Covid-19 measures
  • 50 percent growth in CDN data traffic (Content Delivery Networks) - this is a jump of several hundred Gigabits per second in data traffic
  • Double the number of users of online and cloud gaming platforms since last week
  • 10 percent average data traffic growth

Online more frequently and longer

What is interesting is that Internet users are now online more frequently and for longer during the day. Normally data traffic at Internet Exchanges moves in waves – beginning at 6am and reaching its peak at around 9pm. Now, as people are increasingly at home, the waves are flattening out over the whole day and the data traffic is becoming more evenly distributed. You can see the graph, for example, from the DE-CIX Frankfurt IX here.

DE-CIX physical capacity is regularly expanded for the long term and we always have sufficient free capacity for traffic growth. We have put together some FAQs with further information. You can find them here.

  • DE-CIX Frankfurt statistics
  • DE-CIX Hamburg statistics
  • UAE-IX statistics
  • DE-CIX Madrid statistics