The London Internet Exchange (LINX) suffered a major failure on Wednesday afternoon, leading to a significant slowdown of UK traffic. LINX acts as a main peering point for UK ISPs, allowing them to exchange traffic directly, which is cheaper than sending it via transit carriers. LINX is fairly pivotal for UK Internet traffic, and this was shown quite clearly by how far-reaching the effects were when it failed. The impact is visible in LINX’s 24-hour status graph. To be fair, LINX is pretty reliable, so this isn’t an issue that crops up very often.
Over the last 48 hours, we’ve re-routed our traffic to avoid LINX. This is because we keep spare capacity in place for eventualities like this. Some ISPs don’t purchase extra capacity so have been forced to leave their LINX connection in-place causing slow service or unavailability for their customers.
Melbourne has always maintained that there’s too much reliance on London in the UK’s Internet industry. It’s frightening how much of the UK traffic passes across LINX (estimates are between 70 and 95 percent of all UK traffic). The design principals of the Internet obviously mean re-routing of traffic if a failure of any node occurs, but obviously if so much of the UK’s trafic passes through one point, it’s hard to re-route it without side-effects.
We’ve always sought to take advantage of our Manchester location in terms of resiliency. We try to keep as much Internet traffic out of London as possible; in this respect we peer with other ISPs in Manchester wherever possible, so for example, customers will see traffic headed for Virgin, Microsoft, the BBC and some other notable providers, be handed over in Manchester, avoiding London completely. To this end, we see approximately 20% of our traffic handed over in Manchester.
We’ve taken it one step further though, ensuring that we have connectivity that leaves the UK, without going back via London. In this respect two of our three main bandwidth providers, Tiscali and Cogent, have routes leaving the UK which avoid London. Tiscali have fibre leaving the UK at Southport which goes via Dublin and then on to the US, and a separate route to Paris. Cogent have just brought online a route to Paris which avoids London and will next year bring online a route to Amsterdam which leaves the UK through Hull.
The above means in the event of a London-wide failure, Melbourne’s services would still be accessible to a world-wide audience.
Daniel Keighron-Foster, Technical Director.