Dear peers,

Before sharing with you some technical news for the last quarter of 2025, I would like to wish you all a happy new year!

News

Segment Routing and EVPN deployment

As part of France-IX's backbone optimisation strategy, we continue to make steady progress on the deployment of Segment Routing (SR) and EVPN.

Following the successful rollout of Segment Routing across the entire backbone router infrastructure, we also completed the deployment of Route Reflectors based on a hybrid architecture combining bird and IOS-XR. These Route Reflectors are a key building block to ensure the stability and scalability of the SR-EVPN architecture.

With these foundations in place, we reached an important milestone in mid-December with the successful deployment of the first EVPN region on the AURA / Lyon peering LAN. The migration from VPLS to EVPN was performed smoothly, with only a minimal service impact limited to a few seconds, fully in line with our operational expectations.

We also took this opportunity to deploy a Streaming Telemetry dashboard, enabling real-time visibility throughout the migration process and providing more accurate and proactive monitoring of the new EVPN infrastructure.

Building on this success, the EVPN rollout will now continue on the remaining peering LANs. Marseille is scheduled for migration by the end of January, followed by Paris, which will mark the completion of this EVPN migration project.

Multipass: A simplified way to access remote France-IX regions

France-IX launched the Multipass service in April, enabling peers to connect with remote peers in any city where France-IX operates an IXP, at no additional cost.

Multipass fully complies with the BGP Roles and Only-To-Customer routing policies as defined in RFC 9234.

Customers can request the activation of the service directly through the France-IX customer portal at Portal, simplifying the provisioning process.

More details : Multipass — France-IX

Infrastructure Upgrade in Marseille : New 800G Edge device activated

As growth in Marseille continues, a new Nokia 7750 SR-1x-48D platform, supporting interfaces up to 800G, has been activated at the DRT MRS1 PoP.

This investment marks an important step in the progressive modernisation and harmonisation of our backbone infrastructure, ensuring consistent interface capabilities across our network and meeting the increasing capacity demands of our customers.

Route Servers (RS) update

ASPA validation is coming soon (we want to make sure the IETF drafts are stable and RFC-ready before full ASPA activation). If you published ASPA records, make sure they are correct. Once activated, “ASPA Invalid” routes will be dropped (not re-announced to peers) by the route-servers. This will bring additional security to the routing infrastructure by performing additional checks relying only on authoritative sources on AS-paths.

Figures

A few figures about Q4-2025:

New customer ports (including upgrades) Q4-2025:

• 10G: 10 ports
• 100G: 5 ports
• 400G: 0 port

Availability during Q4-2025 for local peering services :

• Bordeaux : 100%
• Lille: 100% 
• Lyon: 100% 
• Marseille: 100% 
• Paris: 100% 
• Toulouse: 100%

NOC service Q4-2025:

• NOC tickets handled: 128

Outages:

• Toulouse - 7th of October 2025: Following a multiple fiber cut in the Toulouse area impacting all our links towards the Eurofiber DC – TLS00 datacenter, remote peering services from this PoP were unavailable for 22 minutes.
• Lille -26th of November 2025: Following a multiple fiber cut in the Lille area impacting all our links towards the ETIX Lille #2 datacenter, remote peering services from this PoP were unavailable for 120 minutes.

Upcoming projects and operations

• Completion of the EVPN migration on peering LANs in Marseille and Paris, marking the final phase of the EVPN rollout across all France-IX regions.
• Deployment of new 400G–800G-capable platforms at the DRT PAR5 and DRT MRS2 Points of Presence during Q1 2026, to support network growth and increasing customer demand for 400G connectivity.
• New partnerships with French Cloud providers will be announced, aiming to promote digital sovereignty while strengthening local interconnectivity.
• Customer portal enhancement allowing customers to order cross-connects and request on-site interventions directly through the portal.
• Additional backbone capacity between Paris and Marseille, with the first 400G wave scheduled for activation in Q1 2026.

Happy peering with us,

France-IX technical team