Image: Bas van Schaik, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia

Earlier this month, the Amsterdam Internet Exchange, or AMS-IX, hit a new record: per second, more than 9 Terabits of data passed through the Exchange. To put that into perspective: that’s about 256 movie DVDs, or 469 hours of HD video streaming, or 220 million pages of typed text. In a single second! What is the Amsterdam Internet Exchange, and why are they seeing this much data traffic?

For starters, since the early days of the Internet, traffic volumes have always been growing as new applications were invented and the Internet found an evermore important role to play in our lifes. The current Covid crisis is also definitely having an impact: as more and more people are video conferencing instead of going into the office, or trying to ward of boredom by streaming another Netflix series, data usage continues to grow. So it makes sense for Internet traffic to reach new records. But why exactly is AMS-IX seeing so much of it?

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