We’re happy to share with you some technical news for this fourth and last quarter of 2022! We hope you will read this review with interest!

News

• Lyon/Grenoble: Consolidating dark fiber and wave infrastructure

Deployment is still ongoing on the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes (aka AURA) region.

The consolidation of the architecture in Lyon is a prerequisite to some larger new projects that will start rolling out in the first part of 2023.

The new 10GE waves between Lyon and Grenoble should be carrying traffic over the next months.

• Moving from OTN devices to nx400G amplified waves

This year, we made great progress in the 400GE rollout in our network.
After extended tests and production links running between DATA4 and core PoPs for over six months, carrying hundred Gbps of traffic, we moved a step further and migrated the interconnection between our core PoPs.

This operation, extensively prepared, was the occasion to mix and match different 400GE flavors, with amplified, un-amplified spans, and a mix of technologies on the same link:

• • 10G legacy DWDM (around 1550nm);

• • 100G over Nokia OTN muxponders operating on 400G coherent lambdas (around 1550nm);

  • 400G ER8 (1310nm);

  • 400G-ZR Tunable optics.

We did not observe any issues mixing all those technologies together, using high-quality band-splitters and DWDM multiplexers. Cabling, however, was quite a challenge due to the many parts involved, especially on the amplified spans.

If you want to know more about our advances in 400G Coherent pluggables and 400GE in general, you can watch a talk that our Network Engineer Thomas Delaby gave at RIPE85 in Belgrade: RIPE85.

Figures

A few figures about Q4-2022:

• New customer ports (including upgrades) Q4-2022:
  • 10G: 10 ports
  • 100G: 9 ports
  • 400G: 0 port

• Availability during Q4-2022
  • Lille: 100%
  • Lyon: 100%
  • Marseille: 100%
  • Paris: >99,999%
  • Toulouse: 100%

• NOC service Q4-2022:
  • NOC tickets handled: 63

• Outages:
  • 19/10/2022: Due to an intentional fibercut, we experienced a loss on some 100G waves interconnecting cities. As links are diverse and redundant, there was no impact other than higher latency between cities.
  • 17/11/2022: After an electrical maintenance at Interxion PAR1, one of the two electrical feeds did not came back as expected. We requested a datacenter hands and eyes to fix this. Unfortunately, the technician erroneously switched off the second feed, leading to loose the entire cabinet during few seconds. The device connecting customers took around 13 minutes to reboot entirely. A 10G linecard connecting three customers didn’t come back after this reboot. We dispatched a field engineer onsite to swap the card with a local spare. The three affected customers experienced a 75-minutes impact.
  • 18/11/2022: Due to major instabilities on the 100G wave between Toulouse and Paris, members could have experienced some losses. After re-routing packets through Marseille, latency have raised to around 17ms instead of 11ms.

Upcoming projects and operations

• Nokia rollout: Telehouse 3 PoP will be upgraded to a Nokia SR-1 device, therefore 400G customers’ interfaces will be available;
• Lyon: in order to have homogeneous platform and services, new Nokia FP5 platform will be progressively installed beginning of 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 recently launched for Lille: @as62228).

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

Happy peering with us,

France-IX technical team