The telecom giant claims its exit from public internet exchanges will give customers "lower latencies." The evidence suggests they're in for a nightmare.
Editor's Note: This article is based on comprehensive research of publicly available sources including official press releases, regulatory filings, consumer complaints, technical forum discussions, academic studies, and industry publications. We may have failed in some areas to grasp the issue entirely. The reader is advised that not everything might be correct and you should follow the sources and conduct your own research to get an adequate understanding of the subject at hand.
There's a reason your internet feels like magic. When you click a YouTube video in Berlin, that data doesn't travel some convoluted path through half of Europe to reach you. It flows through something called an "internet exchange point"—a giant room full of routers where hundreds of networks connect directly, swapping traffic efficiently and, crucially, for free.
Vodafone Germany is about to blow that system up.
By the end of 2025, Vodafone will have completely withdrawn from every public internet exchange in Germany, including DE-CIX Frankfurt, the largest internet exchange on the planet. Instead, all traffic will flow through a single company called Inter.link, which charges content providers based on how much data they send to Vodafone customers. It's the telecom equivalent of a landlord announcing they're demolishing all the sidewalks in town and replacing them with a private toll road.
Vodafone insists this will deliver "lower latencies, more resilience, and cost savings." But if you're a Vodafone customer, you might want to brace yourself. Because there's a decade of evidence from Deutsche Telekom—Germany's other telecom giant, which did almost exactly the same thing—suggesting you're about to experience internet hell.
The open internet was supposed to work differently
To understand why this matters, you need to understand how the internet actually works. And it's not how most people think.
When you pay for internet service, you're not buying access to some centralized "internet"—you're buying access to your ISP's network. That network then connects to thousands of other networks through a patchwork of agreements and connections. The magic happens at places like DE-CIX Frankfurt, where over 1,000 networks plug into the same switching fabric and exchange traffic directly.
This system is called "settlement-free peering," and it's one of the internet's foundational principles. No money changes hands. Networks exchange traffic roughly equally, everyone saves money on long-haul transit costs, and users get faster connections because data takes the shortest possible path.
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