By Tony Hallett, 29 September 2004 17:55
NEWS The UK has the busiest internet hub on the planet. A statement from the London Internet Exchange (Linx) this week says that the facility in London's Docklands now handles 55 gigabits of traffic - or 55,000,000,000 bits - per second.
This puts the hub - for a long time one of the world's busiest - ahead of similar facilities in the US and Japan. Linx was founded 10 years ago by five UK ISPs.
At the same time, the latest research from Baskerville estimates that the UK passed the five-million broadband lines mark during September.
The figures show around 50,000 premises in the UK are getting broadband every week. Of the five-million figure, three million are using DSL, meaning the other two million are using other technologies, mainly cable modem-based broadband from suppliers NTL and Telewest.
Very few DSL users who buy from suppliers other than BT are benefiting from unbundling of local exchanges. Only around 13,000 subscribers buy a service that their provider doesn't simply get from BT Wholesale.
This is against 730,000 who take advantage of unbundling in France, Baskerville pointed out in a research note.
By the end of next year, there are expected to be around eight million UK broadband connections.
Comments
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1. Neil Postlethwaite
As the world's busiest Internet Hub, I hope they have DR facilities in Scotland or Wales. Concentrating LINX in London Docklands, in an age of the threat of terrorism or potential electric shortfalls in winter seems insane.
Remember BT, Manchester and the tunnel fire that brought Manchester and most of Lancashire/Cheshire to it's knees a few months back !!!
2. Simon
It's not a surprising statement - given that in the UK we have a very centralised exchange (Linx). I'm sur ethe US shifts much, much more traffic about, but it is less centralised because of it's size and so each individual exchange is smaller.
The fact that Linx is so critical to the UK internet infrastructure should be a cause of worry to all of us - where will that 55Gbps go if Linx gets shut down ? Yeah, I know they have all sorts of measures in place, but if a terrorist wanted to damage the UKs internet capability - where do you think they would strike ?