Dear peers,

We’re happy to share with you some technical news for the third quarter of 2023! We hope you will read this review with interest!

News

• Nokia rollout approaching completion

Replacement and standardization of our routing platform, started back in 2020, is now close to an end. We deployed over the last 3 years no less than 13 Nokia routers in various locations: Paris, Marseille, Toulouse, Lille, Lyon … Nokia routers are now pushing 2Tbps of traffic, growing year over year.

During Q4-2023, we will move to Nokia in those PoPs:

• • Equinix PA6, that will feature the first 800GE-ready interfaces!

  • Interxion/DRT MRS2

  • 7 PoPs in the Lyon/Grenoble region

• Telehouse 3: Adding more co-location housing capacity

We are introducing co-location housing capacity @TH3 PoP. This offer, combined with co-location housing @TH2, meets customer demand for a fully redundant hosting solution. Housing capacity starts at 1 rack unit. Interconnection services can easily be provided between the two PoPs.

• Lyon: Adding more co-location housing capacity

Project started during Q2-2023 has progressed. In SFR Netcenter Vénissieux, a private cage is being built, featuring up to four new racks with 800x1200mm dimensions, allowing for easier and safer future operations. Anticipating a huge number of fiber interconnections to manage, we also installed Huber+Suhner LISA “private meet-me-rooms”, that will streamline cabling in the cage.

A new, 800x1200mm rack has also been installed in IN2P3. With a similar Huber+Suhner interconnection system, we will enable this rack to house new and existing customers, aiming at better quality of service.

• Introducing 100G LR1 for customers

100G LR4 optics have been for years the interconnection standard for 100GE in the datacenter space. France-IX has more than 150 100G LR4 optics deployed today.

100G LR1 optics, using a single lambda long reach single-mode, are becoming more and more popular. These optics are simpler to produce, resulting in cost savings. We can also expect greater reliability.

France-IX has already started to introduce these optics for its own backbone needs as well as with 100G wave providers. We think it is now time to introduce and promote this optical standard to connect 100G customers. As a consequence, new peering ports will now, by default, be provisioned with 100G LR1 optics, when available.

Figures

A few figures about Q3-2023:

• New customer ports (including upgrades) Q3-2023:
  • 10G: 19 ports
  • 100G: 15 ports
  • 400G: 0 port

• Availability during Q3-2023:
  • Lille: 100%
  • Lyon: >99.999%
  • Marseille: >99.999%
  • Paris: >99.999%
  • Toulouse: 99.992%

• NOC service Q3-2023:
  • NOC tickets handled: 73

• Outages:

France-IX availability remained very high this quarter. However, we noted a higher-than-usual number of outages due to link failures from inter-city 100G wave providers. Thanks to the redundancy and diversity of the paths between cities, most of the time the only impact caused by these multiple outages was higher latency for remote services.

• • 14/09/2023: 2 diverse 100G waves from different providers, connecting Toulouse PoP to other cities came down simultaneously, one outage and one expected maintenance. Toulouse PoP was isolated during 10 minutes. Local peering continued to work, remote peering was impacted during this period. We would like to thank our provider Sipartech for their responsiveness and their ability to provide a 100G backup wave in a short timeframe during their maintenance. Without this action the outage would have been much longer.

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