We’re delighted to announce we’ve joined AMS-IX (Amsterdam Internet Exchange), connecting into it redundantly from our Manchester data centre.
As we’ve mentioned before, peering is where traffic between two ISP networks travels directly between them rather than over an intermediary transit network. This minimises the opportunity for disruption and reduces latency, thus improving voice call quality. We already peer privately with many networks and have been members of other peering exchanges such as LONAP for some years now, and LINX since last year. As a result we peer with anyone who’s anyone in the voice space, often in multiple locations, and approximately 80% of our traffic flows directly to peers, a figure which is amongst the highest in the industry.
AMS-IX is the largest peering exchange on the planet and passes over 1.5Tb per second of traffic at peak. Nearly 500 global networks are present at AMS-IX and being a member enables us to increase our peering further, especially with non-UK networks. Like Simwood, AMS-IX runs its network entirely on Brocade equipment.
As we have connected into AMS-IX from our Manchester node this further equalises the prominence of it to our London node. We now have AMS-IX and other peering all backed up by our high quality TiNet internet transit directly out of Manchester, and crucially it all takes paths out of the UK which do not depend on London. For our Scottish customers, this is available just 7ms away in Manchester rather than routing through London as is common for other ISPs offering service in Scotland.
If you operate your own AS we would very much like to peer with you or supply you with our high quality transit. If not, we would very much like to peer with your ISP where we do not already. Please see http://kb.simwood.com/network/peering for details. We have an open peering policy for both IPv4 and IPv6.
