We’re happy to share with you some technical news for this third quarter of 2022:

General news

• France-IX Lille ready to connect customers

Let’s be honest, we lack the talent to cook you good “welsh” or “carbonade flamande”. However, we very well know how to provide leading-edge interconnection services, especially in French regions!

We’re happy to announce that France-IX Lille will open its doors this quarter! This new IX benefits from a more than ideal footprint at the crossroads of Europe’s main cities : 250Km from both Paris, London and Amsterdam, the heart of the European megalopolis. We cannot wait to see how this new platform will grow to serve local operators and businesses!

To achieve this goal, we installed in CIV1 datacenter a stack of two Nokia 7250 IXR “Big-e”. A ring of 100Gbps backbone comes from Paris, goes through the two routers and back to Paris. As always, the two 100GE waves are redundant and 100% diverse as per our path comparisons carried out during the tender.

Servers were deployed alongside network: a monitoring probe, a general purpose hypervisor and a dedicated route-server hypervisor. In the unlikely event of a complete backbone isolation, local traffic would still be exchanged, and route-server service would still be operational.

10GE and 100GE customer ports are available for sale from now on, and all our services are ready to be offered on those : local peering, remote peering towards Paris, Marseille, Lyon, Toulouse (basically, any region!), and also PNI-VLAN towards the entire France-IX footprint (i.e. profit of your own private MPLS line towards any France-IX region).

• 100G waves national deployment

In order to accommodate for growing traffic between Paris, Marseille, Toulouse and the opening of Lille region, we decided last quarter to launch a tender to deploy new 100GE waves nationally. Many carriers were invited to propose their best offers. The following were selected:

• Between Paris and Marseille, additional 100GE waves will provide redundant 200GE capacity between the cities. EXA infra and BICS were selected for those two new waves.

• Towards Toulouse, from Paris and Marseille, redundant 100GE are in the process of deployment. We trusted EXA infra for the Paris to Toulouse link and Sipartech for the Marseille to Toulouse link.

• Between Paris and Lille, redundant 100GE will be deployed as discussed above, based on Zayo’s and Ielo’s proposals. From Paris, different datacenters (Interxion PAR5 and Telehouse 2) were selected for best redundancy.

Full deployment of this new capacity is expected to be complete by the beginning of October.

• Lyon/Grenoble : Consolidating dark fiber and wave infrastructure

Following the merger with Rezopole over a year ago, we decided to make some changes in the physical infrastructure in the Lyon metro area and between Lyon and Grenoble.

In Lyon, the existing topology will be slightly modified in order to converge towards two core PoPs (CC-IN2P3 and SFR Netcenter) and a few edge PoPs (Jaguar Limonest, Jaguar Rockefeller, Hostelyon).

As for Lyon to Grenoble links, two new 10GE waves will be deployed in order to enhance diversity and capacity on this path.

A tender was launched in June and is still ongoing. Deployment is expected to take place during Q4 2022. This tender will enable us to standardise the infrastructure, as well as lift restrictions on our ability to extend services from and to other regions.

• Moving from OTN devices to nx400G amplified waves

Earlier this year, we successfully deployed two 400G-ZR backbone links between Telehouse 2, Interxion PAR5 towards Data4 Paris Saclay. This first deployment enabled us to get familiar with EDFA technology, which was required to make 400G work on such long distances (up to 60 kilometers).

After a few months of flawless operation, we decided to go forward and start planning for the deployment of four new 400G links between Interxion PAR5 and Telehouse 2 – Léon Frot. A comparison between a lot of different optical modules and EDFA module suppliers was conducted, and we have chosen to work with Smartoptics for the amplifier part. A mix of vendors will be implemented for the modules.

Although there are stringent requirements on channel width, we could reuse our existing passive DWDM multiplexers for 400G operation as their quality permitted it.

Figures

A few figures about Q3-2022:

• New customer ports (including upgrades) Q3-2022:

• • 10G: 13 ports

  • 100G: 15 ports

  • 400G: 0 port

• Availability during Q3-2022:

• • Paris: >99,999%
  • Lyon: >99,999%
  • Marseille: 99,995%
  • Toulouse: 100%

• NOC service Q3-2022:

• • NOC tickets handled: 57

• Outages:

• • 4th August – Marseille – Jaguar Network DC upgrade: an issue occured during the software upgrade, maintenance downtime announced was exceeded, 7 members impacted;
  • 12th August – Lyon & Paris: human error caused a 15 minute disruption of remote peering services between Lyon and Paris. 3 members were impacted in Paris, 6 members in Lyon;
  • 27th August – Paris: unexpected line-card reboot, impacting 8 members during 4 minutes.

Upcoming projects and operations

• Nokia rollout: Equinix PA7 and Telehouse 3 PoPs will be upgraded to Nokia SR-1 devices, therefore supporting 400G customer interfaces;

• 400G ZR will be deployed between Interxion PAR5 and Telehouse 2 core PoPs to move from 1.2Tbps of capacity provided with OTN devices to 1.6Tbps. Amplifiers and boosters will be introduced when needed;

• Lyon: in order to have homogeneous platform and services, new Nokia FP5 platform will be progressively installed beginning 2023. Huawei devices will be replaced in main PoPs SFR Netcenter and IN2P3.

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 the new one that will be launched soon : @as62228).

France-IX team will cover some events : RIPE85, EURO-IX, NANOG, … Don’t hesitate to catch up with us during the upcoming events, it’s always a pleasure to connect with the peering community!

Please also note that in order to support our growth and all the projects mentioned above, we are looking for a wide diversity of talents to join our tech team, ranging from developers (fullstack & lead) to polyvalent technicians, through DevOps and NetOps. Find more information on our website : Carrières

Happy peering with us,

France-IX technical team