DE-CIX boosts boosts gateway offering

Details: Vaughan O'Grady; Category: Data Centres & Networks; 22 October 2026; 631 views

Internet exchange (IX) operator DE-CIX says it has completed a resilient three-route gateway connecting the Middle East and Southeast Europe with Central Europe.

It explains that new backbone connectivity between BIX.BG in Sofia (Bulgaria) and DE-CIX Frankfurt (Germany) is now live, alongside a new direct connection between Sofia and DE-CIX Istanbul (Turkey).

Together with the existing routes directly from DE-CIX Istanbul and DE-CIX Athens, says DE-CIX, the connections give network operators across the Middle East, Asia, and the Balkans three geographically diverse westbound pathways to DE-CIX Frankfurt – from Istanbul in under 40 milliseconds, Sofia in under 35 milliseconds, and Athens in under 50 milliseconds.

Operators can redirect traffic between alternate terrestrial and subsea routes when individual pathways are disrupted or congested, helping them maintain reliable access to cloud, content, and AI infrastructure in Central Europe.

As the company explains, growing geopolitical uncertainty and recent disruption to critical terrestrial and subsea infrastructure have made route diversity an increasingly important part of network resilience. DE-CIX’s backbone pathways are built with geo-redundancy and non-overlapping routes, reducing the risk that a single local incident or infrastructure failure can interrupt connectivity between these regions.

For Middle Eastern networks, the connectivity between DE-CIX Istanbul and BIX.BG in Sofia means that more content is now directly available in Istanbul from the Balkan content hub.

DE-CIX has been operating in the Middle East and Turkey for more than ten years, with six exchanges across the Middle East, including several of the largest in the region. The internet, cloud and AI exchange DE-CIX Istanbul, an important gateway to European networks for the region, connects 70 networks and carries 613 Gbit/s of traffic at peak times.

Networks connected to BIX.BG can now access clouds in Frankfurt, said to be the most interconnected digital ecosystem on the planet, and use DE-CIX’s internet, cloud, and AI exchange, as well as its cloud-to-cloud routing technology, to support digital transformation and the development of AI-supported services in the Balkan region. ISPs in the East Balkans can better serve their enterprise customers with low-latency and resilient connectivity to cloud and AI workloads.

BIX.BG, of which DE-CIX is now a major stakeholder, connects 136 networks with peak traffic exceeding 1.3 Tbit/s, strengthens DE-CIX’s presence in the Balkan region and complements the operator’s other exchange in the region, DE-CIX Athens, the internet, cloud, and AI exchange for the East Mediterranean. The exchange also provides a further entry point to Europe for Middle Eastern, Asian and African networks via subsea cable connectivity from the Black Sea, the Red Sea, and the Mediterranean basin.