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Alternative UK broadband provider YouFibre, which is one of the retail outlets for Netomnia’s (Brsk) growing 10Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network, today claims to have become the first ISP to take a 400G (Gbps) port at the London Internet Exchange’s (LINX) regional interconnection hub in the North – LINX Manchester.
Just for some context. Netomnia’s full fibre network currently covers over 2.08 million premises across parts of more than 90 UK cities and towns, although they’re aiming to reach 3 million homes and businesses by the end of 2025. The network is also home to a total of 238,000 customers via Brsk and YouFibre, and they have an ambition to reach 1 million customers by 2028.
NOTE: The combined group of Netomnia and Brsk is backed by more than £1.3bn of equity and debt from investors Advencap, DigitalBridge, and Soho Square Capital.
Crucially, YouFibre has more than doubled their customer base over the last 12-months, and they’ve also indicated their desire to introduce ADTRAN’s cutting edge 50G PON kit across their network (here). The first products on their new 50Gbps capable broadband platform are due to launch in the very near future, but all of this growth and enhanced connectivity also requires more capacity.
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Suffice to say that taking out a 400G port at the Manchester internet exchange is a key part of that capacity drive. Such IXP locations serve as a critical meeting point for ISPs, content networks, media, gaming, finance and enterprise to meet via a single cross connect to share traffic for low latency end user experiences.
The regional IXP, operated by LINX, has experienced growth of its own lately with multiple traffic peaks, tipping the 700Gbps mid-February to then be extremely close to 800Gbps, following the latest Call of Duty and Fortnite gaming updates.
Sam Defriez, Network Director at YouFibre, said:
“We have been monitoring our network traffic growth on a regional level and we’re always looking to stay ahead of user demand, especially in big moments like a gaming update, which has driven our decision to install 400G ports in key locations, starting in Manchester. We will be looking to roll out to more locations through 2025.”
Colin Peckham, Interconnection Manager for LINX and LINX Manchester Lead, said:
“Manchester continues to evolve as a key digital hub and we are seeing new networks connecting into LINX Manchester for more efficient network routing and content delivery as well as existing members, like YouFibre, increase their capacity.
Our Internet Exchange Points across the UK are designed exactly the way that YouFibre are utilising them. Taking a 10G or 100G port at each site in London, Wales, Manchester and Scotland to keep their traffic local. This is especially valuable when our LINX membership fee of £100 per month includes at 10G port with 2Gbps of service at each location for this reason.”
The LINX Manchester networking community is accessible from five data centres across the metro; Equinix, Datum, Pulsant, Lunar Digital and AtlasEdge. Networks meet at the IXP regardless of which data centre they are co-located, creating more opportunities for effective network routing. But normally it’s only global content delivery (CDN) networks or global carriers who have traditionally had demand for the latest 400G solutions.
The news comes only a few months after alternative full fibre broadband provider toob proclaimed itself to be the first UK ISP to take a 400G port at LINX’s largest LON1 (London) Ethernet switching platform for their peering services and more (here).
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