Though this demonstrates significant growth, the company notes that it is less than the 35% growth witnesses in ‘Corona year’ 2020, indicating that the growth of the Internet has returned to pre-pandemic levels.
As one of the largest global hubs for Internet traffic and connected to over 880 networks worldwide, the traffic patterns recorded at the AMS-IX exchange are a good indicator of global Internet use.
“The growth of Internet traffic in 2021 comes from the ongoing digitalisation of society," said Peter van Burgel (pictured), CEO of AMS-IX.
"People continue to click, swipe, app, game and stream driving the Internet to continue to grow with 20% on a yearly basis. We continue to invest in optimising the platform to facilitate this traffic growth.”
The 18% growth in data exchanged in 2021 compared to 2020, shows only a slight increase compared to growth of 17% in 2019. In the ‘Corona year’ of 2020, the amount of exchanged data grew by 35%.
Specifically, the growth witnessed in 2021 stems mainly from the use of new and more Internet services, such as storage in the cloud, games and streaming services, and less from changing user behaviour during the pandemic.
In addition, the traffic patterns on the Global Roaming Exchange (GRX), a platform that enables the exchange of global roaming data between networks, also showed that the traffic is back to pre-pandemic levels.
In 2020, and at the start of 2021, traffic on the GRX was low due to various the travel restrictions, but during the courser of 2021, traffic increased by 80%, reaching a peak of 205.9Gbps in August of the same year.
Across AMS-IX's other global exchanges, it also recorded new traffic peaks, Manama saw highs of 436Gbps, its facility in Mumbai topped 92Gbps and Hong Kong it achieved 84 Gbps. The traffic increase in Manama was the most significant, as peak traffic for Manama in 2020 was 208Gbps.
