AMS-IX Breaks 4 Terabits per Second Barrier (opens in new tab)

(ams-ix.net)

66 pointsusethis10y ago52 comments

52 comments

"... underlines AMS-IX’s leading position within the global Internet Exchange Point market."

Yeah, i.e. DE-CIX is constantly hitting the 4 Tbps barrier for quite some time now and is trending towards 5 Tbps.

https://www.de-cix.net/about/statistics/

And the gap will only increase if the proposed intelligence services act (Wiv20xx) is passed by parliament. The act allows the intelligence services to mass surveillance all electronic communication and forces all service providers (not just telecom providers) to pay for surveillance equipment.

Besides being morally wrong to mass surveillance everyone when the current act already allows the intelligence services to monitor the few thousand potential terrorists and spies, it would also hurt the Dutch economy. International companies would move their European cloud infrastucture to e.g. Germany and Dutch startups providing a communication service (i.e. almost any startup) would be less trusted by their users and run the risk of paying for expensive surveillance equipment.

If you are Dutch i recommend reading the reaction of Nederland ICT [1] to the proposed act.

[1] http://www.internetconsultatie.nl/wiv/reactie/828d2159-cf3c-...

arianvanp10y ago

The MP who proposed the law has lost support of his party recently (The Labor party) to keep on pushing the law in current form.

Also the CTIVD ,the organization that supervises the AIVD (The dutch NSA) has told the law isn't possible to implement in current form.

So the chance that it will pass it pretty small. Though they'll probably juggle around some words and try again so we should stay alert. Luckily it has gotten quite some media attention and people seem to be aware that the law is a bad idea.

virtuallynathan10y ago

They measure differently - DE-CIX uses a 15s measurement window from sFlow data, AMS-IX uses the traditional 5m window.

usethisOP10y ago

Full updated list is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_exchange_poin...

deugtniet10y ago

Well, to be fair, AMS-IX is located around the Amsterdam Area (a circle of around 30 km orso), while DE-CIX has locations in the US as well. I'm not familiar with the specifics, but based on these locations, I'd say AMS-IX is the biggest internet exchange serving europe.

5 more replies

fs11110y ago

The Dutch are better at marketing, it seems.

akie10y ago

They never said they were the first to break this barrier (but I had to go back and check).

porsupah10y ago

By way of historical comparison, consider that in 1992, the ULCC's transatlantic "fat pipe" was a 1.5Mbps circuit:

http://jam.ja.net/marketing/janet30years/images/gallery/grap...

Or that the total traffic served by the University of Bath's website across all of 1997 was 63MB:

https://wiki.bath.ac.uk/display/bucsha/Computing+Service+His...

JosephRedfern10y ago

Is... is that figure correct!? Conservatively, taking the number of requests at the start of the year, we get 6 million req/year.

6310241024 == 66060288 bytes. 66060288/6000000 == ~110bytes/request. That seems too small. The overhead of the HTTP request alone (without content) would be greater than that!

porges10y ago

Something does seem funky. The website looked like this in 1997: http://web.archive.org/web/19970418234503id_/http://www.bath... [This page is 3,780 bytes.]

In fact, you can find the server stats from back then: http://web.archive.org/web/19970822145424/http://www.bath.ac...

This says that it transferred "3 599 Mbytes" and there were "728 506" requests. Interpreting "3 599" as 3.599 gives 4.94 bytes per request, which is absurd. It must be 3.6 GB, making each response just under 5 kB. This seems much more reasonable.

So the number on that page should probably be interpreted as 63 GB, which is reasonable if we assume the site became more popular later in the year, as the original source suggests (3.6 GB*12 = 43.2 GB, and the stats are from May).

Also notice the following year (1998) says 126 MBytes and in 1999, 197 GB. That's an order of magnitude jump!

2 more replies

jakozaur10y ago

Yay. More peering at Internet Exchanges makes internet faster and cheaper. Europe has the lowest effective cost of bandwidth:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-a...

Loic10y ago

This is really interesting to see the 19h -> 24h increases in traffic. Most likely due to online streaming, this is a predictable sharp increases on the Hamburg and Munich POP[0] for DECIX.

[0] https://www.de-cix.net/about/statistics/ (scroll a bit down)

TranceMan10y ago

More likely due to the release of iOS9. A couple of other European Internet exchanges also peaked last night [0].

In the past few years Apple have been embracing public peering much more - according to PeeringDB they are at 37 locations with many having multiple 100G connections.

0: https://stats.linx.net/aggregate.html

Loic10y ago

If you look at the weekly statistics, you see the bump everyday. If iOS is putting a concentrated load on the network from 20h to 24h, they could redesign a bit their update system to spread a bit more during the day...

1 more reply

threeseed10y ago

But Apple uses Akamai as their CDN.

I always assumed given its age and role that it would have the best peering bar none.

1 more reply

Ecco10y ago

Those numbers seem very low to me, I feel like something doesn't add up. Indeed, 1 GBits FTTx offers from FAI are getting more and more widespread, so that would mean that the peak traffic is around only 4000 simultaneous users?

zifnab0610y ago

Usage vs capacity. I have Gbit service at home, but I'm not saturating the link 24/7.

georgerobinson10y ago

Genuine question! Have you ever been able to saturate your connection with a single TCP stream or did it require multiple streams (possibly from multiple devices)?

rottyguy10y ago

How come we're still using bits-per-second and not bytes-per-second? Any reason other than being historical at this point?

pmorici10y ago

Because the size of a byte isn't fixed. It is hardware dependent. There is no definitive standard defining what the size of a byte is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte

rottyguy10y ago

I would be surprised if, practically speaking, 8bits <> 1 byte for 99.99% of all general applications. My feeling is that the .01% can do the math so the other 99.99% don't have to.

1 more reply

LeonM10y ago

Data is send serially over a fiber or copper line, bit by bit, not per byte. Also because bytes can be compressed, bits cannot, so giving the throughput in bits-per-second is an absolute value.

rottyguy10y ago

Bytes can be compressed in sequence not in singularity (just as bits). I mean why don't we measure storage in bits and not bytes? Just seems unnecessarily confusing.

1 more reply

jo90910y ago

Even if the only reason is historical: why not, what advantage would bytes per second have?

rottyguy10y ago

How long does it take to transfer a gigabyte file? Sure we can do the math but why (considering the average person)? Maybe there should be a common core revolution in engineering :-)

1 more reply

NietTim10y ago

Thanks to the launch of iOS 9 :) Funny to see the big bump after 19:00

tantalor10y ago

How is this a "barrier"?

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

52 comments

heromat10y ago

"... underlines AMS-IX’s leading position within the global Internet Exchange Point market."

Yeah, i.e. DE-CIX is constantly hitting the 4 Tbps barrier for quite some time now and is trending towards 5 Tbps.

https://www.de-cix.net/about/statistics/

felixmar10y ago

If you are Dutch i recommend reading the reaction of Nederland ICT [1] to the proposed act.

[1] http://www.internetconsultatie.nl/wiv/reactie/828d2159-cf3c-...

arianvanp10y ago

The MP who proposed the law has lost support of his party recently (The Labor party) to keep on pushing the law in current form.

Also the CTIVD ,the organization that supervises the AIVD (The dutch NSA) has told the law isn't possible to implement in current form.

virtuallynathan10y ago

They measure differently - DE-CIX uses a 15s measurement window from sFlow data, AMS-IX uses the traditional 5m window.

usethisOP10y ago

Full updated list is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_exchange_poin...

deugtniet10y ago

5 more replies

fs11110y ago

The Dutch are better at marketing, it seems.

akie10y ago

They never said they were the first to break this barrier (but I had to go back and check).

porsupah10y ago

By way of historical comparison, consider that in 1992, the ULCC's transatlantic "fat pipe" was a 1.5Mbps circuit:

http://jam.ja.net/marketing/janet30years/images/gallery/grap...

Or that the total traffic served by the University of Bath's website across all of 1997 was 63MB:

https://wiki.bath.ac.uk/display/bucsha/Computing+Service+His...

JosephRedfern10y ago

Is... is that figure correct!? Conservatively, taking the number of requests at the start of the year, we get 6 million req/year.

6310241024 == 66060288 bytes. 66060288/6000000 == ~110bytes/request. That seems too small. The overhead of the HTTP request alone (without content) would be greater than that!

porges10y ago

Something does seem funky. The website looked like this in 1997: http://web.archive.org/web/19970418234503id_/http://www.bath... [This page is 3,780 bytes.]

In fact, you can find the server stats from back then: http://web.archive.org/web/19970822145424/http://www.bath.ac...

Also notice the following year (1998) says 126 MBytes and in 1999, 197 GB. That's an order of magnitude jump!

2 more replies

jakozaur10y ago

Yay. More peering at Internet Exchanges makes internet faster and cheaper. Europe has the lowest effective cost of bandwidth:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-a...

Loic10y ago

This is really interesting to see the 19h -> 24h increases in traffic. Most likely due to online streaming, this is a predictable sharp increases on the Hamburg and Munich POP[0] for DECIX.

[0] https://www.de-cix.net/about/statistics/ (scroll a bit down)

TranceMan10y ago

More likely due to the release of iOS9. A couple of other European Internet exchanges also peaked last night [0].

In the past few years Apple have been embracing public peering much more - according to PeeringDB they are at 37 locations with many having multiple 100G connections.

0: https://stats.linx.net/aggregate.html

Loic10y ago

1 more reply

threeseed10y ago

But Apple uses Akamai as their CDN.

I always assumed given its age and role that it would have the best peering bar none.

1 more reply

Ecco10y ago

zifnab0610y ago

Usage vs capacity. I have Gbit service at home, but I'm not saturating the link 24/7.

georgerobinson10y ago

Genuine question! Have you ever been able to saturate your connection with a single TCP stream or did it require multiple streams (possibly from multiple devices)?

rottyguy10y ago

How come we're still using bits-per-second and not bytes-per-second? Any reason other than being historical at this point?

pmorici10y ago

Because the size of a byte isn't fixed. It is hardware dependent. There is no definitive standard defining what the size of a byte is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte

rottyguy10y ago

I would be surprised if, practically speaking, 8bits <> 1 byte for 99.99% of all general applications. My feeling is that the .01% can do the math so the other 99.99% don't have to.

1 more reply

LeonM10y ago

Data is send serially over a fiber or copper line, bit by bit, not per byte. Also because bytes can be compressed, bits cannot, so giving the throughput in bits-per-second is an absolute value.

rottyguy10y ago

Bytes can be compressed in sequence not in singularity (just as bits). I mean why don't we measure storage in bits and not bytes? Just seems unnecessarily confusing.

1 more reply

jo90910y ago

Even if the only reason is historical: why not, what advantage would bytes per second have?

rottyguy10y ago

How long does it take to transfer a gigabyte file? Sure we can do the math but why (considering the average person)? Maybe there should be a common core revolution in engineering :-)

1 more reply

NietTim10y ago

Thanks to the launch of iOS 9 :) Funny to see the big bump after 19:00

tantalor10y ago

How is this a "barrier"?

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse