RWTH Aachen University is connected to the internet via the German Research Network (Deutsches Forschungsnetz, DFN). The DFN association operates and develops the communications infrastructure for science and connects universities and research institutions at around 850 locations throughout Germany.
Until now, RWTH Aachen University had a 100GE connection to the DFN router in Frankfurt and a redundant 100GE connection to the DFN router in Hanover.
To optimize the time it takes for a data packet to reach its destination, known as latency, packets are always sent via the shortest route. As a result, the geographical proximity means that the connection to the DFN router in Frankfurt is used more intensively than the one to Hanover. In addition, the Frankfurt location has better connectivity to national and international networks than the Hanover location.
Due to the constantly increasing volume of data for new and data-intensive IT services, the capacity limit of the RWTH uplink was temporarily reached. The associated higher latencies reduced the network quality.
To prevent this from happening in the future, the RWTH uplink was expanded:
Since August 7, 2025, at 4:31 p.m., the redundant connection with 2x100GE to Frankfurt and 2x100GE to Hanover has been in productive operation. Both connections can be used in parallel. This provides a total capacity of up to 400Gb/s.
Thanks to this increase in performance, all users of the RWTH network can now continue to enjoy stable and fast access to the internet and thus also to research data distributed worldwide.