According to the company, this new peak traffic is most likely a result of the growth of the Amsterdam platform. Over the last few of months, a lot of networks have been upgrading their port capacity to handle their traffic growth.
In addition, the cold, rainy autumn weather is most probably also a factor as people tend stay indoors when the weather worsens and in turn, people tend to use more Internet services like video games or video streaming when at home.
“This peak underlines the critical role AMS-IX has as digital mainport for Internet traffic across the globe. We saw tremendous growth in Internet traffic last year,” said Peter van Burgel (pictured), CEO at AMS-IX.
“In December last year, we reached a peak traffic of 7Tbps, and in less than a year we’ve topped this with 2Tbs more. We live in uncertain times, but you can be sure of one thing: Internet traffic is always growing.”
Additionally, the lockdown and containment measures of European governments has also played a part. A lot of countries have restrictions like an evening clock, closed restaurants and cancelled events, which contributes to people staying at home. Over 875 networks are connected to the Amsterdam interconnection hub, 75% of them are of European origin.
Breaking down these new speeds 9Tbps accounts for significant amounts of data traffic. Specifically, simultaneous streaming of 1,800,000 HD/1080p videos; 469 hours of HD/1080p video streaming, 2.4GB all transmitted in one second; simultaneous streaming 360,000 4K videos; 4 hours of 4K videos 12GB, all transmitted in one second; the transmission of just under 220 millions of typed A4 pages, in one second; the transmission of almost 195.000 volumes of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, in one second; and the simultaneous streaming of 225 billion typists who can type 300 characters a minute.
