Five Blind Men and the Internet: Towards an Understanding of Internet Traffic

Our current view of traffic on the Internet - the world’s largest and most pervasive network - comes from a variety of perspectives, each with its own blind spots and biases. In this paper, we make the case for using publicly available Internet exchange point (IXP) statistics as a complementary vantage point. While IXP data has its own limitations, it is fine-grained, accessible, and independently verifiable - offering a distinct perspective on Internet usage patterns. We present results from a two-year study (2023-2024) of 472 IXPs worldwide, capturing approximately 300 Tbps of peak daily aggregate traffic by late 2024. Over this period, aggregate IXP traffic increased by 49.2% (24.5% annualized), with regionally distinct diurnal patterns and event-driven anomalies. These results provide an accessible framework for researchers and operators to study the Internet’s evolving ecosystem from an IXP-based perspective, and lay the groundwork for systematic, global-scale detection of network anomalies and outages.