The Soccer World Cup semi-finals last year were responsible!

For the year 2022, Internet Exchange (IX) operator DE-CIX saw a significant increase in traffic. A total of more than 48 Exabytes (EB) of data were exchanged via its facilities around the globe.

This increase is the storage capacity of more than 370 million smartphones (each with 128GB of storage), and comprises enough data to fill the storage of slightly more than one smartphone for every man, woman, and child living in the USA. This same 48EB is also roughly the data volume of a nearly 1.8-million-year-long video stream in HD quality, or a 5.5-million-year-long video call.

Comparatively, this is a 25% increase over the same facilities in 2021, which registered a total data throughput of 38EB.

The day with the highest data throughput per minute in the firm’s operations was December 14: At around 20:28 Central European Time, on the evening of the Soccer World Cup semi-final in Qatar between France and Morocco, 132TB of data flowed through the firms internet exchanges in a single minute, setting new records in its New York and Frankfurt facilities.

Other IX records were set

Last year, DE-CIX locations in New York, Madrid, and Mumbai also saw significant data growth, and all surpassed the magic 1 terabit-per-second peak-traffic mark.

In addition, DE-CIX Dallas almost doubled its data traffic throughput in 2022, passing the 500 gigabit-per-second mark and finishing the year at 625Gbit/s, while the UAE-IX in Dubai saw peak traffic rise to almost 400Gbit/s on 22 November, coinciding with the Soccer World Cup game between Argentina and Saudi Arabia.

Explained Dr Christoph Dietzel, Global Head of Products & Research, DE-CIX: “The peak throughput for the World Cup semi-finals shows how much all areas of life are becoming digitalized worldwide. Over the course of the year, however, there were significant differences in when which services were used. For example, during the summer months the major IXs in Frankfurt, New York, and Madrid saw a significant drop in data traffic generated by video conferencing. In gaming, although aggregate data throughput was highest in the last quarter, there was a rapid month-on-month increase at all three IXs in June, at the start of summer.”