Posted: 20th Oct, 2005 By: MarkJ
The London Internet Exchange (LINX) has reached a new record level in excess of 100 Gigabits per second (Gbps) - making LINX the first Internet exchange in the world to handle this volume of traffic:
The 100 Gb/s barrier was breached on Monday and Tuesday of this week (17 and 18 October 2005) due to a sudden and temporary surge of traffic caused by problems elsewhere on the Internet.
Malcolm Hutty of LINX said: "It is a feature of the Internet that traffic is routed around problems.
This week the Internet has been dealing with problems by routing traffic through LINX. We have been able to take the surge in traffic - around 10 per cent higher than our normal peak load - without any problems because of our robust system architecture. The LINX exchange is designed to deal with the unexpected."
Around 50 per cent of the world's Internet routes are accessible from LINX where nearly 200 Internet service providers (ISPs) and content delivery service providers (CDSPs) exchange traffic between their networks.
Malcolm Hutty added: "The high degree of connectivity available at LINX combined with the scalability and resilience of our systems makes us an obvious routing option for day-to-day traffic - and these same benefits come into play when there is a need to respond to temporary changes on the Internet."
The Internet traffic at LINX consists of a wide variety of data including website downloads, business information and emails. However, one gigabit is roughly equivalent to 60,000 average email messages - so the peak traffic at LINX this week would accommodate 6 million email messages per second.
Even this week's 10 per cent temporary uplift in traffic at LINX is more than many Internet exchanges around the world handle in the normal course of their activities.