Dear peers,

We're happy to share with you some technical news for the third quarter of 2025!

News

Segment Routing and EVPN deployment

As part of France-IX's backbone optimisation strategy, we are advancing the deployment of Segment Routing (SR) and EVPN technologies. Following the successful rollout of Segment Routing across the entire router infrastructure, our efforts are now focused on enabling EVPN on the peering LANs, with several migrations already scheduled in the coming weeks.

A crucial step before introducing EVPN is the deployment of Route Reflectors, which play a key role in ensuring the stability and scalability of an SR-EVPN architecture. A comprehensive evaluation was conducted to identify the most suitable solution for our environment. Based on the results, a hybrid approach combining Bird and IOS-XR was selected to deliver this important functionality. The first Route Reflectors have already been deployed, paving the way for the upcoming EVPN activation phase.

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.

As previously announced, legacy Inter-IXP users in the Lyon/AURA region were migrated to Multipass at the end of Q3 2025 to ensure a consistent service experience and align with best practices, particularly regarding route servers implementing BGP Roles and Only-To-Customer (OTC) routing policies as defined in RFC 9234.

In the near future, customers will also be able to request the activation of this service directly through the customer portal.

Explore the details and get this option activated : https://www.franceix.net/en/services/peering/multipass/

Enabling connectivity to Sovereign Cloud Providers

After establishing our partnership with Scaleway to provide the Interlink service, we are now working with other partners to expand this initiative and promote digital sovereignty. An additional partnership has already been signed and will be announced soon.

Infrastructure Upgrade in Marseille : New Edge device installed

Growth in Marseille continues. A new Nokia 7750 SR-1x-48D platform, supporting interfaces up to 800G, has just been installed at the DRT MRS1 PoP. This equipment will be brought into service in the coming weeks, enabling support for 400G and 800G interfaces at this site.

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

Route Servers (RS) update

As part of ongoing discussions and best practices shared within the Route Server Working Group at Euro-IX, France-IX is aligning its operations with the current community recommendations regarding BGP attributes:

• End of support (since Sept.29 2025) for “Extended BGP Communities” (RFC 4360, “route-target style”). These attributes are considered legacy and present limitations.
• End of support (since Sept.29 2025) for the legacy 32-bit to 16-bit ASN mappings used with standard communities (RSASN:64700...64899). These mappings have not been updated for several months and are now fully deprecated.
• “Large BGP communities” (RFC 8092) are the recommended way of signalling between peers and route-servers.
  
  • Almost all features have already been transitioned to large communities, and the remaining ones will follow.
  • Additional details and timelines will be shared as the migration progresses.
  • On the long-term, they are supposed to be the only way of signalling.
• More generally, the usage of standard BGP communities will be progressively reduced over the next few months and years.

We recommend reviewing your configurations and policies accordingly to ensure compatibility with these upcoming changes.

Figures

A few figures about Q3-2025:

New customer ports (including upgrades) Q3-2025: More than 1Tbps of capacity connected!

• 10G: 3 ports
• 100G: 10 ports
• 400G: 0 port

Availability during Q3-2025:

• Bordeaux : 100%
• Lille: 100%
• Lyon: 100%
• Marseille: >99,999%
• Paris: 100%
• Toulouse: 100%

NOC service Q3-2025:

• NOC tickets handled: 90

Outages:

• Marseille - 16th of September 2025 : We experienced a linecard failure @DRT MRS1 PoP connecting 6 customers, causing a service interruption of approximately 6 minutes. We are currently investigating this abnormal behavior in collaboration with the vendor to determine the root cause.

Upcoming projects and operations

• Progressive EVPN activation on peering LANs.
• Additional partnerships with French cloud providers will be available to promote digital sovereignty while enhancing local interconnectivity.
• Enhancement on customer portal.
• Additional capacity will be installed between Paris and Marseille, first 400G wave will be activated.

If you want more technical information, you can follow our large panel of twitter accounts (@as51706 for Paris, @as42064 for Marseille, @as43100 for Lyon, @as47184 for Toulouse and @as62228 for Lille).

Happy peering with us,

France-IX technical team