TMCnews Featured Article

Low latency is more important than ever with increasing reliance on the cloud. Fast Internet is what consumers expect, and latency is particularly an issue when it comes to VoIP and unified communications.

In an effort to reduce latency and help make it a regional tech hub, the city of Birmingham in the U.K. is strongly considering the rollout of a local Internet Exchange Point (IXP) that will give it access to high-speed fiber links with extremely low latency and high resilience.

Peering involves two networks coming together to exchange traffic with each other freely for mutual benefit. This reduces network cost, increases redundancy by reducing dependence on one or more transit providers, increases capacity for extremely large amounts of traffic, provides better routing control over data traffic, and improves performance.

“Birmingham has always been a well-connected city,” noted Birmingham councilor James McKay. “Two centuries ago, our extensive canal network enabled us to become the powerhouse of the industrial revolution. By investing in world-class digital infrastructure that will deliver super-fast connectivity, we now have the opportunity become the powerhouse of the data revolution.”

More than half the population of Birmingham is under the age of 35, according to McKay. The city already generates £2 billion ($3.03 billion) in revenue from its creative and digital industries and employs more than 38,000.

A new Internet Exchange Point and a world-class data center would help the city support and attract new data-hungry businesses, the city has speculated. New jobs are much needed—unemployment stands at around 40 percent.

“An Internet exchange point will play an important role in underpinning our digital economy,” suggested Raj Mack, head of Digital Birmingham. “The City has already attracted significant numbers of innovative ISPs, award winning content providers such as Maverick TV, and is a thriving talent pool for creative agencies, games companies and global technology giants with more than 1700 companies located here.”

These companies include the likes of the BBC, Rare Ltd., Codemasters, Blitz, Activision (News - Alert) and Sega, among others.

“LINX ethos has always been to keep traffic local,” noted Derek Cobb, the chief technical officer at LINX (London Internet Exchange), a not-for-profit organization that was behind the first U.K. Internet Exchange Point in 1994. “Originally this was about ‘the UK versus the rest of the World,’ which prior to LINX being established, data would go to USA and back. Now we recognize the increasing potential for regional peering within the UK itself.”

He added: “As data traffic continues to grow, there is more demand for data-intensive services such as gaming and VoIP (voice over IP) that require low latency and high quality of service; therefore, it becomes more important to reduce the dependency on London.”