The London Internet Exchange (LINX), a leading interconnection hub, has seen network data traffic passed by its members across its multiple peering LANS grow substantially over the last year.
On the exchange’s primary LON1 platform in London, data traffic has increased by well over 40%. The figure is closely reflected across all of LINX’s interconnection hubs, both in the UK, and the US. Indeed, all LINX LANs have set traffic records since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
When the first UK lockdown commenced at the end of March 2020, LINX’s peak traffic record stood at 4.30 Terabits per second on the LINX public exchange. The second lockdown in November saw this increase to 5.64 Tb/s while in lockdown 3, in January and February 2021, that figure had reached 5.93 Tb/s. That’s a staggering increase of 37.8%, and it’s still rising.
Richard Petrie, LINX’s Chief Technology Officer, commented:
“We continue to see strong traffic growth across both our London based exchange points with LON2 peaking well past the 800GE mark last month. With schools and many of the UK Universities now running 100% remote learning, LON2 traffic has surged in January. The disaggregated platform that uses hardware from Edgecore Networks and software from IP Infusion is performing fantastically, with our SLA exceeding 99.9999% across the last 3 months alone.”
LINX’s dual LAN network infrastructure in London provides members with added resiliency as they can take duplicate ports on both LANs. Both LANs span a 64km metro area serviced by 16 points of presence (PoPs) from multiple carrier neutral data centres.
As everyone has been affected by the pandemic, we all have personal experience of how the Internet is being used differently to the way it was before. More home working, video calls, online shopping, home schooling, as well as increased access to on-demand TV content and gaming.
To handle these changes, many larger content networks have taken a regional peering approach with LINX during last 12 months. By keeping traffic local to the end user, this ensures that their network is able to deal with increases in traffic levels, lower latency which results in an improved end user experience.
At the start of 2020 LINX was home to 903 member ASNs with the exchange having 30.572 Terabits of connected capacity. A year on, it’s 960 ASNs with connected capacity totalling 37.6 Terabits. These represent increases of 10.6% and 23% respectively. Also notable is the increase in port upgrades. At the beginning of 2020 LINX had 203 connected 100GE ports while today it’s 270, a rise of 33%.
While it is too early to say if this growth will continue at the present rate, it’s clear that LINX, and its members, are prepared and are able to meet the demands placed on its infrastructure by end users.
