study
Internet Copes With Traffic Growth In Pandemic
Internet traffic continued to increase significantly in the second year of the coronavirus. Photo: Marijan Murat/dpa
© dpa-infocom GmbH
Digital work meetings, after-work beers together on Zoom: A lot has shifted to the Internet during the corona pandemic. This is now also reflected in an analysis of the data traffic.
Internet traffic continued to increase significantly in the second year of the coronavirus. The world’s leading internet exchange operator DE-CIX recorded a significant increase in its data traffic in 2021.
During this period, more than 38 exabytes of data were exchanged at the internet nodes. This corresponds to the storage capacity of more than 300 million smartphones, each with 128 GB of storage space. The amount of data is also comparable to the volume consumed by the population of a small town if each resident watches a high-definition video stream for a lifetime.
Compared to the previous year and the start of the corona pandemic, data traffic has increased by around 20 percent. In 2020, the total data throughput was still 32 exabytes. “Data traffic stabilized at a high level worldwide in 2021 after the outbreak of the pandemic and the record hunt in 2020 and continues to grow,” explained Christoph Dietzel, Global Head of Products & Research at DE-CIX. “This shows that concepts such as home office with video conferences or home entertainment with video streaming and gaming have become established in everyday life and that growth will continue.”
Data volume grows with the number of infections
The course of the corona pandemic and the relocation of many jobs to the home office also directly influenced the data volume of the network nodes: The data throughput of video conferences via the Internet node in Frankfurt was particularly high in the first few months of the year until the end of the lockdown and contact restrictions. In the summer months with lower infection numbers and the holiday season, however, it was only half as much as at the beginning of the year. A similar distribution was found for video streaming via Netflix, Disney Plus, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+ and other services, but with smaller seasonal differences.
DE-CIX operates one of the world’s largest internet nodes in Frankfurt am Main. The Hessian company is also active at 31 other locations in Europe, North America, the Middle East and Asia. DE-CIX connects almost 2500 network operators, Internet service providers, content providers and company networks from more than 100 countries.