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Engineer internet

LINX67 15th birthday meeting – the internet continues to grow

A milestone for the London Internet Exchange with its 15th birthday meeting today at Goodenough College in London. These are seriously useful meetings of like minded souls from the internet industry.

The internet is run by geeks that work extremely hard. In fact they live and breathe technology on a 24 x 7 x 365 ¼ basis and these LINX meetings bring them together for long days of meetings and presentations but also long evenings of letting their hair down.

LINX meetings are quarterly. Since the last one in the summer the peak traffic on the LINX network has grown by an incredible 25%. If the trend continued that would mean more than doubling in a year. The traditional perceived wisdom for growth in internet usage is 50% pa which is close to what I see on the Timico ADSL network.

LINX’s growth has been fuelled by an increase in membership of around 15% this year though clearly that wouldn’t account for the proportional increase in bandwidth.

For geeks everywhere who believe that size does matters the LINX network currently has over 2.5Terrabit per second capacity. The organisation is clearly providing value for money which is why all these new members are knocking on the door.

A year ago I seem to remember a statistic that said that 65% of the internet was reachable via LINX peering. Now this has grown to 70%. This is good news for end users as it helps to keep prices down.

Interestingly 75% of new members are from outside the UK, including a fair number from Russia. The UK is becoming increasingly an important place on the internet map.

More snippets from LINX67 as I think of them. The meeting is absolutely packed.

Trefor Davies

By Trefor Davies

Liver of life, father of four, CTO of trefor.net, writer, poet, philosopherontap.com

7 replies on “LINX67 15th birthday meeting – the internet continues to grow”

Hi Trefor – congratulations to Linx and I think it is imperative to the Uk economy to be a vital & integral cog in the internet. Not to mention revenue to HM government!

Question is – is it a good idea to have everything going through one peering organisation?

Steve

Steve

Resilience has been a key feature and objective of LINX since the founding in 1994. It isn’t the case that we have “everything going through one peering organisation”, Internet traffic routing is far more complex and diverse than that. LINX encourages its members to peer as widely as possible, not just in London. Hope that helps.

Regards

John

Steve
Actually an ISP will typically be a member for several peering exchanges and also have a number of transit partners.

Off the top of my head we at Timico have 6 different way’s out onto the internet.

Tref

Just as a footnote (assuming that there are no further comments) LINX is seen as a role model in this space. We connect to them at two physically separate locations on our MPLS network.

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