Get Your Network Ready for the Holiday Traffic Spike: Peer at FD-IX Before Thanksgiving

If your transit links ran hot last November, buying a bigger commit only treats the symptom. Most of that holiday load comes from a short list of content networks, and you can reach a lot of them directly on the FD-IX peering fabric. Start now and you can have a port turned up before Black Friday.

Why the holidays hit so hard

Retail, payments, streaming and gaming all peak in the same few days, and a large share of that traffic comes from a small group of content and CDN networks.

Akamai saw 11.8 billion bot management requests on Black Friday 2025, up 79% from 2024. Account protection traffic on Cyber Monday more than doubled. Then there are game downloads, patch days and a long weekend of streaming, all landing the same week. Expect your late-November evening peak to sit well above October's.

On transit, that shows up as burst charges, and if the links congest, your customers see buffering and slow checkouts.

Keep holiday traffic local

Traffic between networks on FD-IX crosses our switching fabric directly. It doesn't leave town through a transit provider. A lot of the networks behind holiday traffic are already connected.

First, it takes load off transit. Whatever moves to peering is off your commit and off a congested upstream.

Second, latency drops. Two networks in Indianapolis have no reason to swap traffic through Chicago, and on FD-IX they don't. Gamers notice that. So do checkout pages that make dozens of requests before they finish loading.

Third, you have another path. If an upstream has a bad day in the middle of the rush, your peering sessions keep a big share of traffic moving.

How to get the most out of it

Peer with the route servers first. FD-IX runs them under AS13681, and one pair of BGP sessions gets you routes from every network that peers openly on the exchange. You can see results before the holidays without setting up dozens of bilateral sessions.

Some large content networks peer selectively and won't show up over the route servers. Pull your flow data from last November, find your top source ASNs, and reach out to the ones on the exchange for bilateral sessions.

FD-IX ports run from 1G to 100G. Look at what you pulled from content networks during Thanksgiving week last year and pick a port speed that covers it.

The timeline

Thanksgiving is November 26 this year. Black Friday is the 27th and Cyber Monday is the 30th. A new FD-IX connection usually takes 7 to 14 business days from application to turn-up, depending on cross-connects at your facility, so there's time if you get the order in soon.

FD-IX is in Netrality's Indy Telcom Center, DataBank IND1 and Lifeline Eastgate in Indianapolis, with partner facilities across Indiana and the region. If you're already in one of those buildings, you need a cross-connect and a port. If you're not, remote peering over a Layer 2 transport circuit is an option we can look at.

Existing members should check port utilization and top traffic sources now. If last year's peak got close to your port size, plan the upgrade before Thanksgiving.

Call the FD-IX team at +1 (463) 209-7100 or reach out through fd-ix.com. Our network engineers can help size the port, set up route server sessions and get you live before the rush.