Proximity Data Centres to Deploy UK Network of Regional Internet Exchanges
One of the country’s fastest growing edge colocation data centre providers, Proximity Data Centres, has announced that they’re planning to roll-out of a new network of regional internet exchanges across the United Kingdom and Europe. Better network latency will be one of the key outcomes.
Work is expected to get underway during Q1 2023, with Proximity’s newly formed Edge IX division commencing a phased build out of internet exchanges, which will be based at each of Proximity’s regional colocation data centres. Currently, there are 10 such facilities strategically located to conurbations and cities in the North, North West, Midlands, Thames Valley, South West and South Wales.
Further data centres equipped with exchanges will be added to the portfolio during 2023, as the company continues to expand to put its services within reach of 95% of the UK’s population. The move largely reflects the provider’s commitment to reducing network latency by bringing data and related services physically closer to the end users, devices and customers.
John Hall, MD of Colocation, Proximity Data Centres, said:
“Solving latency and data transit challenges are high priorities for Proximity and our growing portfolio of customers, especially those developing virtual reality, gaming and IoT services. The wider availability of regional internet exchanges will enable the lowest latency possible for demanding edge computing applications and services including those for gaming, healthcare, manufacturing and smart cities, while also offering a more efficient and cost-effective solution for the backhauling of rapidly growing data volumes.
Internet exchanges in the UK have been successful in supporting the development of the digital economy but the increasing demands of low latency bandwidth-hungry applications requires a new approach, complementing the existing infrastructure model. The proliferation of edge data centres and internet exchanges will play a vital role in regional economic development. The availability of these resources at a local level will support digital businesses, regional tech hubs and bring significant economic growth to the regions. These will in turn bring new opportunities to the benefit of local communities.”
End.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and Linkedin.
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Would be interesting to know which ISP’s are using this company
In most cases it will be altnets, big data transmission players like Level3, Cogent will probably not be interested.
Not many Altnets are using their facilities, not intentionally anyway. For example the Proximity Bridgend site is actually the old CGI (was Logica) facilities. The strategy is sale-leaseback arrangement, where the original tenant is in most cases slowly moving equipment out of the site. Another of these is Swindon, which was Capgemini Merlin DC.
They have another handful of ex-bank sites and I suspect we’ll see some of the smaller DC operators Node4 etc sell sites to Proximity in the coming year.
IXPs at these small regional datacentres don’t make any sense, large proportions of Altnets haul psuedowire’d QinQ customers back over their networks to Docklands, Slough and Manchester where their BNGs are located and layer3 breakout happens.
So in reality this IX programme of Proximity’s will end up with them using up valuable RIPE IPv4 space, thankfully now only a /26 for each new IXP (see RIPE 2023-01) and some switches deployed.
Better yet where specifically these IEX will be located, I see “one in Wales” are we certain where? My gut says Newport or could be Cardiff.. Second thought, cost to get a PTP Mircowave link planted ontop of one of their POPs with LOS to my home would be ideal to get those really low latency times.. Before anybody comments sillyness.. just let me have my dream. we can dream right 🙂
NB
I wonder if this announcement is due to Ogi’s announcement about their new NoC build out..
https://proximitydatacentres.com/locations/bridgend-data-centre/
Well, while technically it should not be a problem to build a network layer link it will be a massive/expensive to be LIR (still you could find a sponsor LIR) but getting your own /24 PI IPv4 to setup a BGP will be almost impossible in these days.
Based on the UK’s geographic size and the latency between major metropolitan areas, I’m a little unclear about the benefits of regional PoPs. For example, Manchester to London is ~10ms so to have PoPs closer than this would benefit single-digit improvements at best.
Agree with many of the comments here. Any sizeable ISP already has presence in London, Slough or Manchester.
For those not aware there’s already a member owned IXP in Wales at Newport and Cardiff. LINX Wales. There’s lots of history but that’s proven there’s no requirement for it.
After 9 years peak traffic is < 200Mbps:
https://www.linx.net/about/network/linx-wales/
Whilst this should be good for alt nets, I have a suspicion for a few of them that their bng’s will be located in London. To take advantage they would have to move them deeper into their networks. That said, I think it would be nice if every town or at least region had an IXP and ISP’s would do their best to avoid tromboning traffic. For IPv4 it is probably not feasible due to the use of CGNAT (alt-nets are not going to want to maintain a set of servers at each POP). For ipv6 it should be a bit easier to allocate customer prefixes from a regional pool.
In the UK we should agree on some standard BGP communities to identify regions. These could either be linked to ISO 3166 or to Openreach exchanges.