DE-CIX Launches New Backbone Gateway to Frankfurt
The new connection improves network redundancy and latency for internet service providers in Southeast Europe and Türkiye.
Updated on Oct. 27, 2026 in Data Centers
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DE-CIX has launched a new network gateway connecting the Middle East and Southeast Europe to Frankfurt, Germany. This infrastructure expansion establishes direct backbone routes between Sofia, Istanbul, and Frankfurt to improve routing redundancy.
Why it matters
The expansion addresses the need for network resilience in a region facing geopolitical uncertainty and frequent infrastructure disruptions. By adding non-overlapping terrestrial and subsea pathways, operators can now reroute traffic to maintain uptime during local congestion or outages.
The new connections enable traffic transport between Istanbul and Frankfurt at under 40 milliseconds, Sofia and Frankfurt in under 35 milliseconds, and Athens and Frankfurt in under 50 milliseconds. These routes connect DE-CIX Frankfurt's 20 Tbit/s peak capacity to regional hubs.
The players
DE-CIX
A global internet exchange operator that manages massive interconnection platforms across Europe, the Middle East, and the United States.
BIX.BG
The Bulgarian Internet Exchange located in Sofia, serving as a primary peering point for 136 regional networks.
The details
The gateway utilizes geo-redundancy, a strategy of locating network nodes in geographically dispersed areas to ensure availability. By directing traffic across non-overlapping routes, network operators can dynamically steer data packets away from localized physical cable failures or terrestrial congestion. This setup links the BIX.BG exchange in Sofia, which handles 1.3 Tbit/s in peak traffic, with the massive DE-CIX Frankfurt hub, which processes 48 exabytes of data annually.
Timeline
October 26, 2026: DE-CIX backbone connectivity becomes officially live.
The Tech Race
The expansion signals a shift in the race to secure critical internet architecture in the Balkans and the Middle East following the 2024 Red Sea subsea cable disruptions. It positions DE-CIX against regional competitors by integrating isolated networks into the core Frankfurt ecosystem.
Network operators and regional service providers can now route traffic with lower latency and higher reliability between the Middle East and Central Europe. This improvement in back-end connectivity is intended to reduce downtime for end users during local or regional fiber-optic outages.
The takeaway
This deployment solidifies a resilient bridge for data flowing from the Middle East to the European backbone. Operators should monitor transit metrics for these new paths to verify if the reported latency figures hold during peak traffic windows.
Further reading
Learn more about the latest infrastructure trends in Data Centers.
Source note: This article includes information reported by Thefastmode.
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