France-IX Portal
26th of October 2015
To satisfy the increasing traffic of its members, France-IX now makes it possible for them to connect with 100 Gbps LR4 ports on its triple core in Paris and its region and its two points of presence in Marseille. Optimisation and ease of usage are the key concepts driving this move.
Three questions to France-IX’s managing director, Franck Simon.
With the 100 Gbps ports offer, what do you bring to your members ?
Until now, we were providing our members with 1 Gbps and 10 Gbps ports and several options of traffic. These two types of ports were sufficient but with the increase of members connecting 4*10 Gbps, 6*10 Gbps and 8*10 Gbps, releasing 100 Gbps ports started making more sense. We want to provide these members with a connection easier to handle and to do so we’ve already installed chassis and linecards to connect the first 100 Gbps ports right away.
Why are you launching this offer now ?
For two reasons: first, the market wasn’t 100G-ready until recently. To get connected to France-IX through a 100 Gbps port, the concerned network must of course dispose of the 100 Gbps technology on its own equipment which represents a significant investment. So we waited for the democratization of this technology within the eyeballs and major content providers, as this had for effect to decrease the price point of these ports.
The second reason is that this year, we’ve experienced a higher growth than the previous years. We have been able to increase investment for new equipment and negotiate better conditions from the suppliers. It was clear for us that we had to launch the 100 Gbps at a price fully in-line with european peering market trends. At France-IX, for the same global cost, you can now opt for two 100 Gbps ports cost rather than 10 * 10Gbps.
What do you expect in 2016 ?
We plan on connecting the first members with 100 Gbps ports at the very beginning of 2016, starting with the major operators.
We also plan on offering SLAs (Service Level Agreement) Regarding the 100 Gbps ports, that means for instance the capacity to connect the second 100 Gbps port on the same site as the first one but on a different chassis. That will enable the active-active load balancing and therefore maintain a high resiliency rate while simplifying the design.
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(...) With the connection of 100 Gbps ports, we expect a rise of traffic, meaning that the connected networks will benefit from more capacity right away without having to upgrade by 10 Gbps slices.
Our policy of over-provisioning remains truer than ever. We already installed 100 Gbps linecards to deliver the service as quickly as possible. In that same fashion, we provisioned the backbone to absorb the new traffic in-between the sites.
