DE-CIX Frankfurt: remote peering from Poland

DE-CIX Frankfurt is an internet exchange operating in Frankfurt am Main, consistently listed among the largest in the world by the volume it carries. A significant share of the European internet peers there: carriers, content networks, cloud providers and hosting companies from across the continent. For a Polish operator it is the shortest route to traffic that cannot be picked up at domestic exchanges.

Why operators peer there

Frankfurt acts as a European transit hub, so networks without a presence in Poland almost always have one there. Peering at this location takes traffic to large content networks and cloud providers off paid transit while shortening the path: instead of leaving through an upstream and coming back, the traffic goes directly. With the traffic profile of a typical ISP, where video content and cloud services dominate, the difference in the transit bill tends to show from the first month.

How to get there

• Your own presence: colocation in one of the Frankfurt facilities, a DE-CIX port, a cross-connect and hardware somebody has to service on site. The most control, the highest cost of entry and a permanent foreign outpost to run.
• Remotely via AS202520: you connect to us in Poland and we carry your traffic to DE-CIX. No colocation in Germany, no travel and no second set of hardware.
• Through another transit provider: you receive DE-CIX routes as part of transit, but without your own peering session and without control over what you exchange and with whom.

What to expect

DE-CIX runs an open peering policy and provides route servers, so establishing sessions with a large share of members does not require negotiating with each one separately. Worth remembering that the port is not the whole job: sensible peering needs tidy IRR objects, valid ROAs and an up-to-date PeeringDB record, because without those the filters on the other side will simply reject your prefixes. Current member counts and technical details are best checked directly in PeeringDB, since they change continuously.

DE-CIX Frankfurt and AS202520

We do not have our own routers in Frankfurt and we do not pretend otherwise. We serve DE-CIX remotely: we take your traffic in Poland, over a cross-connect in one of our data centers, a VLAN at a Polish internet exchange or a GRE tunnel, and carry it to the exchange. Billing follows download, from 50 PLN per Gbps, with the 10:1 ratio matched to operator traffic profiles, and one port reaches not only DE-CIX but the whole set of exchanges and content networks we serve.