Back in April 2017, The London Internet Exchange announced the availability of a new fibre product in the form of Bi-Directional Optical Transceivers, at their regional exchange IXManchester.
LINX member, reseller partner and data centre operator, TeleData, were keen to announce to fellow peers at the exchange last week, that they had successfully upgraded their 10G port to the new Bi-Di optic, being the first member at the exchange to do so. As a LINX Connexions Partner, this upgrade immediately enables customers at their own data centre, Delta House in Manchester, to take LINX connections with greater capacity and it has also allowed an additional connection utilising fibres already in place, removing the need for extra cross connects.Matthew Edgley, Commercial Director of TeleData says:“The main thing for us and the customer was being able to provision an additional high capacity LINX port from our data centre, without expensive third-party cross connect fees that are charged to connect into the core LINX PoP at the other end; which could have made the customer connection cost prohibitive. We provided the customer’s cross connect at TeleData free of charge as we’d rather promote and enable LINX connections and member expansion from our data centre, than put cost barriers in the way.”
“We hope this will encourage more potential LINX members to see the advantages and join the exchange via a Connexions partner and data centres such as ours.”
When joining LINX, most members connect using a fibre pair or cross connect. One fibre is dedicated to receiving data from network equipment and the other fibre will be dedicated to transmitting data to the network. The new product, Bi-Directional Optical Transceivers (or Bi-Di transceivers for short) allows both the transmitting and receiving of data on a single fibre resulting in the benefit of reduced interconnect cost for the member, whilst doubling the capacity of each cross connect.
TeleData customer and LINX member Boundless were the first to use the new Bi-Di optical link at their IXManchester location, Williams House, and have successfully migrated their peering over.
Chris Bewley, Technical Director from Boundless says:
“The use of Bi-Di transceivers has enabled us to take a new 10G port at IXManchester, giving us future regional peering capacity as we continue to grow our network. Previously, the cost of third-party cross connect fees at Williams House would have been prohibitive to us taking the new port in IXManchester.”
“The order process was straight forward and we are seeing good, stable connectivity to the exchange from our equipment in TeleData.”
LINX’s Bi-Directional Optical Transceiver service is currently only available at IXManchester, however, there is an expectation that this product will be rolled out to all LINX exchanges, including both London LANs, in the future.
For further information please email the LINX Member Relations team.