Why Frankfurt became Europe’s interconnection capital
A combination of geography, neutral exchanges and abundant power turned a single German city into the gravitational centre of European internet traffic.
David Okafor
Data Centre Correspondent
Ask any network engineer where Europe’s internet meets itself and the answer is Frankfurt. Home to DE-CIX — among the busiest internet exchanges on earth — and a dense ring of data centres, the city is a textbook example of how interconnection compounds.
The flywheel
Networks come to Frankfurt because other networks are already there. Each new participant makes the exchange more valuable, which attracts more capacity, which attracts more participants. That flywheel is extraordinarily hard for rival cities to replicate.
The constraint ahead
The limiting factor is now power and land within the city. As a result, capacity is increasingly spilling into the wider region — but Frankfurt’s role as the logical centre of European peering looks secure for the foreseeable future.
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