London and French Internet Exchanges (IX) to Collaborate

The London Internet Exchange (LINX), which acts as a central hub for much of the Internet traffic that enters and leaves the United Kingdom, has today announced a new collaboration agreement with their French counterpart (France-IX) that aims to improve peering in Europe and beyond.

Both Internet exchanges (IX) are membership-based organisations that seek to foster an open “internet for everyone” style community of interconnecting network operators, although France-IX has only been around for 6 years and is a much smaller operation (LINX has been in existence for about 20 years).

At present LINX is home to around 750 members connecting from over 70 different countries worldwide and they handle up to around 3Tbps+ (Terabits per second) of traffic each day. By comparison France-IX was only established in 2010, although they’ve already managed to attract 300+ networks in Paris and 30 in Marseille; handling up to about 650Gbps+ (Gigabits per second) each day.

Admittedly Internet exchanges already have to work together by virtue of the very traffic that passes through their shared networks, but today’s agreement goes a lot further and enables the two to directly collaborate on areas such as operations and software development, as well as commercial activities and promotion.

The two also intend to “share technical and commercial knowledge and expertise as well as driving the concept of regional peering and keeping traffic local,” which they hope will result in a better service by producing and releasing new tools and processes.

John Souter, CEO of LINX, said:

“Network operators and Internet exchanges understand how important it is to work together for a greater good. By collaborating with France-IX we can help maintain and grow an effective Internet for everyone.”

Franck Simon, President of France-IX, added:

“One of our aims is also to work on helping both English speaking and French speaking African countries to develop IXPs, and be able to provide African networks with the ability to reach either London or Marseille.

Since we launched in June 2010, we have developed partnerships with other IXPs resulting in interconnections with 5 partner IXPs in Europe and 4 IXP trainings and support in Africa. However this partnership with LINX represents a first at this level of cooperation among all sorts of areas of the operations.”

This is of course one of those seamless (under the hood) aspects of international network connectivity that most consumers never really see, but it’s nonetheless an interesting development.