Information Exchange

The purpose of the Internet has always been the exchange of information – however, few envisaged just how much information we would be exchanging! Whether you are an online business, a regional ISP serving consumers or the IT department of a financial services organisation your role is effectively the same – ensuring information availability to your respective users.

The Network - The Platform To Ensure Information Availability

User expectations are placing greater than ever demands on internet infrastructure. Online gaming and gambling, social networking sites, comparison and transactional sites all require real-time delivery - and businesses serving those markets are struggling to keep pace with increasing user demand. Existing UK telecoms infrastructure was, for the most part, designed to just deliver ‘voice and data’ rather than to meet the demands of real-time and bandwidth hungry applications now used daily by both business users and consumers.

The Network - An Interconnecting Platform

Central to our network build strategy is the concept of connecting data centres together. Data centres are the storeroom of our communications world so it makes sense that these are interlinked and information can be exchanged between all those connecting into these data centres. For the business users this means, for example, that instead of building network and data centres for individual storage and back-up solutions, they can be run far more cost-effectively over the existing NWIX network infrastructure.

Growing Value of Peering

The overlay of the Edge-IX Peering LAN on the NWIX network provides our customers with the opportunity to freely exchange traffic between their respective networks. Peering is not Internet access, but rather access to the networks and content of other companies you peer with.

There are many reasons to peer :

• ISPs and content providers are being impacted by the increase in both use and amount of data being downloaded and will only remain competitive by having on-net services.
• Content has also become harder to cache and with streaming media and peer to peer applications like online gaming the efficiencies gained by web caching are effectively obsolete. 
• Equally this applies in a business context, as software as a service and Internet delivery of applications become more mainstream, peering arrangements with those providers become hugely beneficial to providers servicing the B2B marketplace. Due to the standard being the cost of per megabit charging, ISPs, understandably, tend to purchase just enough transit capacity. This does mean that service quality will suffer during spikes in usage; increasing the number of companies you peer with will reduce the amount of transit required and means that existing capacity will be used less, improving overall improving performance at the user site.

Edge-IX is a distributed Internet Exchange providing services to both Access and Content Providers from various locations across the UK . Exchange services are available from all data centre locations on the peering LAN platform. This ensures that customers can avail of professional peering services with other on-net peers, not just within a single city but across the country.

Edge-IX offers conventional peering services for all types of IP traffic as well as the options for broadcasting traffic. We interconnect small and large Internet Service Providers, international carriers, content providers, access providers and application providers.

To date the UK industry has largely responded to changing usage patterns and demands by modifying existing methodologies and using existing access technologies, thereby resulting in networks becoming ever more cumbersome and complex in order to deliver the performance required.

NWIX is now challenging this conventional approach to networking and providing an alternative to discerning content and access providers.