Madrid, one of the capitals on the internet map of the future?

The arrival of 5G and the development of the Internet of Things will have a great impact on the interconnection needs in the coming years and, in this context, decentralization in the will be key internet exchange points and the redistribution of data centers , which will allow to obtain greater speed and save costs in industry 4.0.These strategic trends will transform the internet map and, in this way, will locate locations emerging as Madrid in the first line of the interconnection.

According to a report by Delfos Research, Madrid has an enviable position in southern Europe to become a major international communications node.study argues that an accumulated investment for the next 5 years of 500 million euros in Madrid would have an impact on the local economy of 6,088 million euros , to which an investment in computer equipment would be added worth 6,000 million euros. A total of 1,830 full-time jobs would be created in this scenario.

130 networks connected in Madrid

Since 2016, the city has become the fastest growing internet exchange point in the world, with more than 130 networks connected. Madrid is a center for interconnection and distribution of traffic of data within the Iberian Peninsula and has the presence of important neutral points that interconnect networks and with proximity to large submarine cabling systems that connect it with Africa and America through Lisbon or Bilbao. A This must be added that the combined percentage of connectivity in France, the United Kingdom and Portugal corresponds to 89% of Spain's international connection capacity.

Related DE-CIX, global internet exchange operator, which installed that neutral point in Madrid, has identified the main lines of action that will be established in the coming years to respond to the growing connection demands demanded by 5G, the cloud and the Internet of Things. Trends that Madrid could take advantage of.

trends for future connectivity

• Network and content providers will lead the growth: Content providers have gone from acquiring bandwidth to building their own networks, largely due to the monumental increase in their traffic needs.However, traditional operators and Internet networks will continue to be key to accelerating global Internet capacity in the face of the true hatching of 5G.Thanks to these actors, in 2018 the 393 Tbps have been reached of global capacity of which, two thirds have been deployed in the last four years. This trend suggests that next year we will see another exponential rise and a new milestone in this area.

• More submarine connections between continents: Up to 300,000 kilometers of submarine cable is the estimate of the total deployment of submarine internet connections by 2021, mainly driven by providers of content.Only in 2019, Google expects to complete the installation of five cables: Curie, Havfrue, HK-G, Indigo and PLCN.This way, the new networks that are being created will increase traffic towards the most relevant strategic hubs to global level like New York, Frankfurt or Hong Kong, but they will also lead to a greater diversification of the routes and the need to create new interconnection nodes.

• Increasingly closer to the end user: The greater demands for bandwidth and speed demanded by the new digital economy based on cloud and 5G solutions will help companies choose points of Internet exchange and data centers closer to users to improve performance and latency.As a result, content providers are betting on developing bandwidth near large urban centers-such as Tokyo or Sao Paulo-or by strategic peering locations at the regional level, such as Madrid or Marseille, which will result in the birth of new digital hubs.

• More connected cybersecurity: In a hyperconnected world, security will be less and less dependent on the device and more on the network.Stability connectivity and interconnection points It will take on an even more important role in 2018 while increasing the services and contents that depend on the cloud instead of the physical storage in the devices.Protect against DDoS attacks, whose frequency has not stopped growing in recent years, and a greater investment in cybersecurity and processes of blackholing will be indispensable for companies.

• Coordinated planning from the Administration: These trends create the opportunity for several cities to become key locations for the internet ecosystem, with an important direct and indirect economic injection According to DE-CIX, in 2019 we will see how several capitals will carry out deliberate planning to adapt to this scenario, since it is necessary for the Administrations to lead a concerted effort through a strategic plan in which the main economic agents are involved./li>