100 Gbit/s!

Internet traffic at the London Internet Exchange (LINX) has reached a new record level in excess of 100 gigabits per second (Gb/s) - making LINX the first Internet exchange in the world to handle this volume of traffic.

The 100 Gb/s barrier was breached on Monday and Tuesday of this week (17 and 18 October 2005) due to a sudden and temporary surge of traffic caused by problems elsewhere on the Internet.

Around 50 percent of the world's Internet routes are accessible from LINX where nearly 200 Internet service providers (ISPs) and content delivery service providers (CDSPs) exchange traffic between their networks.

The Internet traffic at LINX consists of a wide variety of data including website downloads, business information and emails. However, one gigabit is roughly equivalent to 60,000 average email messages - so the peak traffic at LINX this week would accommodate 6 million email messages per second.