The World's Biggest Internet Meeting Room Is In Brazil

When two internet companies want to swap traffic, they meet in a room.

The room has a big switch in it. Everyone plugs in. That is called an internet exchange.

There are 1,323 of these rooms in the world.

93 of them have nobody in them.

Another 69 have exactly one. One network in a room by itself is not swapping traffic with anybody.

So 162 rooms are empty or nearly empty. That is 12.24 per cent of them.

Most Rooms Are Small

The middle room has 12 networks in it.

But the average is 42.9. When the average is much bigger than the middle, a few big rooms are pulling it up.

575 rooms have fewer than ten networks. That is 43.5 per cent of them.

The smaller half of all the rooms hold 5.3 per cent of the world's connections between them.

The twenty biggest hold 22.64 per cent.

The Biggest One Is Not Where People Say

People talk about Frankfurt, London and Amsterdam.

The biggest room in the world is in Sao Paulo, in Brazil. It has 1,860 networks in it.

Frankfurt has 1,018. So the Brazilian one is 1.83 times bigger.

Amsterdam has 854. London has 837.

And 3 of the ten biggest rooms are in Indonesia.

Counting Buildings Tells You Nothing

People like to count data centres. That is the wrong thing to count.

The United States has 1,376 of them. That is 23.48 per cent of all the ones in the world.

But only 20.04 per cent of the network connections are in them.

So each American building holds 9.0 networks.

Each Dutch building holds 21.5. That is 2.39 times more.

Indonesia gets 20.2.

A building is just a building. What matters is who is inside it.

How I Know A Room Is Really Empty

I did not want to say a room was empty when it was not.

Each room's owner writes down how many networks are there. Some rooms also publish their own member list.

395 rooms publish one. I checked the two numbers against each other. The middle gap was 3 networks, so they mostly agree.

But 4 rooms said they had nobody, while their own list showed members. Those are not empty rooms. Those are rooms that forgot to update a form.

So I took those 4 out. That is why I say 93 and not 97.

Three Things I Cannot Tell You

I counted networks, not traffic. Two networks moving a huge amount look smaller here than two hundred networks moving almost nothing.

The list is written by the companies themselves. If a country has no rooms on the list, maybe it has none. Or maybe nobody filled in the form.

And this is today, not a story over time. A room that emptied last year looks exactly like a room that opened last week.