The company announced its plans for a Leipzig internet exchange (IX) six months ago, as the first for the states of Brandenburg, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia.
Now it is promising to set up an IX in every state of the federal republic of Germany.
Thomas King, CTO at DE-CIX, said: “Data processing and exchange – for example, between a regional ISP and a video service like Netflix – must be undertaken as close as possible to the end user, because the further the data has to travel, the higher the latency – and the poorer the experience, for example, when streaming video in HD/4K.”
King added: “This will become even more important in future applications for a wide range of industries. In autonomous driving or remote surgery, low latencies are a lifesaver.”
Leipzig (pictured, CC BY-SA 4.0) is 150km south of Berlin, and 350km north-east of Frankfurt, where DE-CIX is based. The Leipzig IX is in the data centres of telecoms and internet companies Envia Tel and Pÿur Business in the Leipzig region. It will eventually be one of the world’s largest IXs, claimed DE-CIX.
Companies can connect to Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Akamai, Netflix, Meta and others, said the company. “Users can benefit from better performance of modern digital applications – for both business and private use – such as cloud computing, video conferencing, video and music streaming and gaming.”
Harald Summa, member of the DE-CIX supervisory board, said: “Good digital infrastructure is a decisive advantage for a region. This results in opportunities by attracting companies to the region and when competing for qualified staff, and ultimately increases the region’s tax revenues.”
He explained: “Frankfurt has become a magnet for the digital economy thanks to DE-CIX. Our goal now is to take this to scale and open an internet exchange in every German federal state in the coming years.”
