200th LINX 10 Gigabit Ethernet Port Taken By Rostelecom

      

The London Internet Exchange (LINX) has announced that Rostelecom, Russia’s national telecommunications operator, has taken the 200th 10 Gigabit Ethernet port at the exchange.

The increased demand for 10GigE ports is due to the need of LINX members to meet escalating bandwidth requirements following the dramatic growth of the global Internet in recent years. LINX already has 685 connected member ports but 10GigE is taking ever-greater emphasis as the membership look to expand their networks still further. LINX was a very early adopter of 10GigE technology with its first switch employed on the Foundry (now known as Brocade) network as far back as 2001.

Rostelecom’s CEO Anton Kolpakov said, “This interconnection upgrade is a direct response to significant growth of traffic in the international segment of Rostelecom IP MPLS network and was implemented to enhance capacity, improve quality and efficiency of telecommunications”.

This growth has seen the share of data and intelligent network services traffic approximately double since the beginning of 2008 and now amounts to 10% of Rostelecom's total revenue.

The strong demand for 10GigE ports enabled the non-profit exchange to reduce the price of these high capacity ports by 7.5% last summer. This continued a run of annual price cuts which has in turn meant that the cost of being a LINX member has decreased year-on-year.

Of the 342 LINX members 111 are now running one or more 10GigE across the exchange. Overall, LINX has more peers, more sites over a greater metro area and access to more Internet routes than any other Internet exchange point in the world.

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Notes to editors:

1. LINX (www.linx.net) is a mutual, not-for-profit organisation whose 330-plus members include 58 of the top 100 global network operators*, almost all UK Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and content providers plus many from the Americas, mainland Europe, the Far East and Africa.
*Total Telecom Global 100, 2009.

2. LINX was formed in 1994 when five ISPs recognised that there were considerable operational benefits to exchanging traffic between their networks in the UK. From the beginning every LINX member has had an equal vote in the management of the organisation.

3. The connection of networks at an Internet exchange point such as LINX is known as 'peering'. Network operators use public peering across the dual LINX Ethernet networks to exchange traffic with any other member by mutual agreement. LINX also offers a managed private network interconnect facility which is used for large traffic flows between two members.

4. LINX has a presence at ten London sites connected by secure fibre and DWDM links. The core of the network currently operates across a 12x10G Ethernet link. The extent and geographic resilience of the network was enhanced in 2008 with the addition of three new points of presence, each outside the main Docklands data centre area in east London.

5. The Internet traffic at LINX consists of a wide variety of data including streaming media, website downloads, business information and emails. Peak LINX traffic is the equivalent of 1,600,000 simultaneous Internet video streams.

For more information on LINX:
Jeremy Orbell
The London Internet Exchange
Telephone: +44 (0)20 7645 3505
pr@linx.net