The Federal Network Agency has been carrying out broadband measurements in Germany since 2015 in order to record and evaluate the performance of stationary and mobile Internet access services. Now the measurement servers for broadband measurement have been connected directly to the world's leading Internet node DE-CIX in Frankfurt.
Together with DE-CIX and Core Backbone GmbH, zafaco GmbH and the Federal Network Agency put the direct connection into operation, creating better measurement options and making the measurement even easier for providers of Internet access services. “Consumers benefit from an even more reliable measurement of their Internet speed,” says Jochen Homann, President of the Federal Network Agency.
In the past few days, the broadband measurement has been connected directly to the DE-CIX Apollon platform in Frankfurt and via GlobePEER Remote to the DE-CIX locations in Hamburg, Düsseldorf and Munich. DE-CIX provides two access ports over 100G each and corresponding interconnection services free of charge, which is intended to ensure easily accessible measurement of the bandwidth in Germany. This was preceded by the outsourcing of broadband measurement from the network of Core Backbone GmbH into an independent, autonomous system. The newly created “broadband measurement” system has a redundant 100 Gbit/s connection to the DE-CIX and the core backbone.
The connection to the DE-CIX enables broadband providers to establish a direct connection between their network and the autonomous system of broadband measurement. This is intended to improve the prerequisites for performing a measurement and thus for determining the performance of Internet access. The interconnection with the new autonomous system of broadband measurement is open to all providers of Internet access services. Measurements are possible regardless of provider and technology.
The broadband measurement was developed by zafaco GmbH, a service provider specializing in checking the quality of Internet access and telecommunications networks, on behalf of the Federal Network Agency. The Federal Network Agency is a regulatory authority of the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy. With a data throughput of more than 10 terabits per second and over 1,000 connected networks, DE-CIX in Frankfurt am Main is one of the largest Internet nodes in the world.