Network technical specifications

About France-IX network

Cutting edge infrastructure upgraded

With our core backbone just upgraded, benefit from our cutting edge infrastructure.

Ports up to 400 G
99.99% availability

Authorized traffic on the platform

Only one MAC address per member is allowed. This limits the risk of loop on the network.
Only 3 Ethertypes are allowed:
- 0x0800 - IPv4
- 0x0806 - ARP
- 0x86dd - IPv6

ICMPv6 and ARP traffic are "rate-limited". "unknown-unicast" traffic, which is broadcasted by the platform, is also "rate-limited".
A global filter is denying STP and bridging protocols. Link layer protocols and IPv6 Router Advertisement/Router Solicitation (RA/RS) are also filtered by the platform.

Technical specifications

In order to guarantee the security of the exchange point, a set of rules has been defined. France-IX reserves the right to shutdown ports that violate these specifications :

The MTU size should be 1500 bytes
Non-unicast packets are not allowed except:
- ICMPv6 Neighbor Advertisement/Solicitation
- ARP
- IPv4 multicast is not allowed

To ensure that these rules are observed:

A quarantine VLAN is used before moving a port into production to check that these specifications are followed
A monitoring tool alerts the technical team if a new ARP entry is detected. Proxy ARP configured on the member port is not allowed.
Sniffer servers are installed in the core network to analyse broadcast traffic, and check that only legitimate traffic is forwarded on the platform

Routes servers

Routes servers have been installed to facilitate the exchange of routes between members
BGP communities are also available to allow routing filtering
For more details please check our route servers page