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Engineer internet peering

Lonap traffic contines to grow apace

Internet traffic growth at Lonap

The chart in the featured image is the yearly 1 day average internet traffic growth at Lonap.

What you see is effectively a reflection of how the internet is growing. The Lonap traffic includes organic growth plus the addition of new members but the details needn’t concern us really – it’s all up and to the right. It’s pretty much the same story in every IXP (except IXP Cardiff but more on that anon). Also peak traffic on the exchange is quite a bit higher than the numbers shown.

internet traffic growthIn 19 months the traffic has almost quadrupled. It’s also interesting to note the drop off at holiday times – notably Christmas and the school summer holidays .

Lonap, in case you didn’t know is an Internet Exchange Point (IXP) and is one of the two main players in London. London in turn is one of the key points of presence on the internet, Amsterdam and Frankfurt being the others in Europe.

It makes sense for networks to employ peering via an internet exchange for both cost and performance reasons. It also makes sense to use multiple IXPs. Only yesterday the Amsterdam based exchange AMS-IX had an outage. It was apparently human error on the part of a member connecting to the exchange.

This type of issue could happen to anyone, despite lots of efforts to minimise the likelihood of a problem. The point is that when an unplanned outage like this happens networks need a back up solution. Whilst IP transit does the job it would be far better to have a suitable IXP alternative.

These alternatives aren’t always available at a given location but where they are then you should consider using one.

In the meantime internet traffic growth is making this industry an exciting place to be. Check out our other internet peering posts here.

Trefor Davies

By Trefor Davies

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

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