MaNAP Internet Traffic Soars

LONDON -- Internet traffic at the UK’s second Internet hub is now regularly over 1.2Gigabit/s - 600% higher than this time last year – and has hit peaks as high as 1.8Gigabit/s.The announcement comes hot on the heels of a major infrastructure upgrade funded by a grant from the North West Development Authority which brings MaNAP up to the similar world-class 10 Gigabit/s capacity and technology standards of the London Internet Exchange (LINX), AMSIX in Holland and DeCIX in Germany.According to MaNAP marketing director Phil Turtle, “Despite the general depression of the technology and internet markets, internet traffic is still on a steeply rising slope. In the past 12 months, MaNAP has changed from being a small regional internet exchange (IXP) to being a full-scale national critical infrastructure resource capable of handling the entire UK internet load should any of the London IXPs fail or suffer an exclusion event.”Turtle explained, “MaNAP does not compete with LINX and the other London IXPs. Its operation is totally complementary and the newly commissioned capacity – using the same Foundry BigIron 10Gigabit switches as LINX – means that for the first time has a fully UK-based geographically diverse major IXP. “ISPs whose fail-over strategy to-date has relied on out-of-UK connections at AMSIX, DeCIX or USA-based exchanges (which covers off their international connectivity but can leave a large part of the of the UK internet greyed-out to their users) can now connect to a second UK based IXP a safe distance from London. Once the majority of ISPs have connected to MaNAP, the UK’s Internet resilience will be effectively doubled,” Turtle concluded.MaNAP