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Amsterdam Internet Exchange uses Photonic Switches for ultra-fast Internet traffic

October 14th, 2004

Press Release

Amsterdam Internet Exchange (AMS-IX), one of Europe’s largest independent exchanges for Internet traffic, has connected a member to the 10 GE (10 Gigabit Ethernet per second)-public peering service for the first time in Europe. Hence the traffic exchanged between Internet organizations, the current growth of which has not been so high since the early days of the Internet, can find its way between end-users even faster than before. Increasingly the Netherlands is a spot for exchanging international Internet traffic

Open Peering is the first AMS-IX member to switch its operational Internet traffic over the AMS-IX 10GE peering service. Open peering is specialized in making Dutch internet traffic faster and more economic for ISP’s, content providers and other organizations with many Dutch users.

“The AMS-IX connection is essential for us to reach the majority of Dutch Internet destinations direct and cost-efficient, “thus Jan Hoogenboom Managing Director of Open Peering. “We are facing an explosive growth of our traffic, and an expansion of the AMS-IX connection was inevitably for us. With the availability of the 10GE-service, we now have sufficient capacity to facilitate that growth until late in 2006. Looking at the growth of both national and international IP traffic, many parties will soon follow us“

The Amsterdam Internet Exchange is the first Internet Exchange to use photonic switches for these new generation connections. Before switching was exclusively based on electronic switches. As a result of the application of light-signal based technology, using mirrors to send out bundles of data in all possible directions, there is no need to constantly switch electronically. It is now possible to switch extremely fast between the switches, and the AMS-IX members who are connected to the AMS-IX platform, can exchange their data traffic with other parties both redundant and immediate.

A substantial amount of ISP’s are expected to use this service, as a result of the strongly increasing amount of Internet traffic. With the introduction of the 10GE peering service and the photonic switches, AMS-IX is able to expand its capacity considerably and the flexibility of the Exchange infrastructure has increased enormously. The expectation therefore is that AMS-IX is going to be the largest Internet Exchange in Europe in 2005 in terms of public peering traffic. With over 200 connected members, AMS-IX is already the largest Internet Exchange Association.

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NOTES TO EDITORS

About AMS-IX

AMS-IX (Amsterdam Internet Exchange) is a neutral and independent not-for-profit Internet exchange providing services since the early 1990's. AMS-IX is one of the largest Internet hubs worldwide, where over 200 Internet related parties come together to exchange Internet traffic amongst them. The AMS-IX platform provides high quality, non-blocking professional peering services for all types of IP traffic whether data or VoIP. AMS-IX hosts the first mobile peering points worldwide, the Global GPRS Roaming Exchange (GRX) and the Mobile Data Exchange (MDX), as well as solutions for broadcasting traffic with the multicast peering service.

For further press information, please contact Marieke van Zuien at LEWIS, Global Public Relations

Tel: 0031 (0)40 235 46 00
E-mail: mariekev@lewispr.com
http://www.lewispr.com

For further information about AMS-IX please contact Cara Mascini:

Tel: 0031 (0)20 305 89 95
E-mail: cara.mascini@ams-ix.net
http://www.ams-ix.net