Internet Stats
A quick reference on the scale of the global internet — the infrastructure your packets cross every time you run a traceroute. Figures are approximate industry reference values, not a live feed.
Top Internet Exchange Points
| IXP | Location | Peak traffic |
|---|---|---|
| IX.br (PTT.br) | São Paulo, Brazil | ~25 Tbps |
| DE-CIX | Frankfurt, Germany | ~17 Tbps |
| AMS-IX | Amsterdam, Netherlands | ~12 Tbps |
| LINX | London, UK | ~7 Tbps |
| Equinix IX | Global (many metros) | ~6 Tbps |
| PLIX / PL-IX | Warsaw, Poland | ~1 Tbps |
How it fits together
Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) are physical locations where networks (ISPs, cloud providers, CDNs) meet to swap traffic directly instead of paying a transit provider to carry it. Keeping traffic local at an IXP cuts latency and cost — which is exactly why a traceroute to a nearby site often stays within one or two ASNs.
Peering vs transit: peering is a (usually settlement-free) direct exchange of traffic between two networks; transit is paying a larger network to reach the rest of the internet. Big content networks peer aggressively to sit as few hops as possible from users.
Submarine cables carry almost all intercontinental traffic — hundreds of fibre-optic cables on the seabed. A single modern cable can move hundreds of terabits per second. When you traceroute across an ocean, that ~60-150 ms jump is light travelling through glass under the sea.
Explore further
- Submarine Cable Map — every subsea cable, interactive
- PeeringDB — the who's-who of networks, IXPs and facilities
- Hurricane Electric BGP Toolkit — look up any ASN or prefix
- Google IPv6 — live IPv6 rollout stats
From the terminal
curl ip.syschecks.com/trace?target=example.com # path + hops
curl ip.syschecks.com/ping?target=example.com # latency + loss
curl ip.syschecks.com/mtr?target=example.com # per-hop loss/latencyWant an alert when an endpoint goes down, latency spikes, a cert expires or your IP hits a blacklist? → syschecks.com