Knowing your Business Interconnection Bandwidth

As businesses continue to rely more heavily on digital infrastructure and cloud-based services, understanding the bandwidth needs of your business’s interconnection has become important. Interconnection bandwidth refers to the amount of data that can be transferred between your business’s IT infrastructure and external networks, such as cloud providers or other businesses.

In What Businesses need to know about Interconnection blog, we highlighted four major importance of interconnection and its importance in advancing your business digital transformation journey. Now that we understand how interconnection is critical to digital business growth, knowing your business interconnection bandwidth is essential.

The Global Interconnection Index (GXI), a market study published by Equinix, reports that,

“Interconnection bandwidth is forecast to be 15x larger than the internet. The digital economy continues to drive worldwide interconnection bandwidth with a forecast compound annual growth rate of 44%, reaching 21,485+ terabits per second, or 85 zettabytes per year, by 2024”.

While traditional bandwidth measures how much data can be transferred over a given network, interconnection bandwidth shows how ready an industry or region is to maximize interconnection. Specifically, interconnection bandwidth measures the capacity to transfer traffic via direct, private interconnections at traffic exchange points hosted inside carrier-neutral colocation data centers.

The ability to proactively assess and apply interconnection bandwidth has become increasingly important as enterprises and service providers create new strategies to grow and expand their digital business capabilities and results. The GXI report also forecast that the EMEA region is expected to grow at a 46% CAGR by 2024, contributing 5,327 Tbps to make up 25% of global interconnection bandwidth. Service Providers deployed 20% more digital infrastructure in EMEA (with higher growth rates) than other regions, enabling high Enterprise interconnection bandwidth growth rates and accelerated digital infrastructure growth.

How then can you determine your business interconnection bandwidth needs?

By measuring installed data center capacity and connections.
Analysing your projected growth of interconnection bandwidth by company size, regional footprint, use cases or vertical industries.
Calculate your bandwidth requirements based on variables including the volume of data your business generates, the number of users accessing your network, and the types of applications that they use.

For many companies, it may be more efficient to outsource their interconnection needs to a third-party data center provider to leverage the provider’s expertise, infrastructure and interconnection options, without investing in the interconnection themselves.

MDXi, an Equinix Company Data Center can provide support in understanding your business’s interconnection bandwidth needs and creating custom interconnection solution to meet those needs. MDXi offers a range of interconnection solutions, a rich ecosystem of network operators, carriers, content providers, cloud services providers, enterprises, and a solid regional footprint in key markets in West Africa to give your business the advantage.