By Oystein Bergmann, Bureau Chief, Scandinavia

Nokia Tuesday announced the further expansion of its relationship with NL-ix, Europe’s largest distributed Internet Exchange provider (IXP), extending the rollout of 7750 Service Routers (SR) with speeds of up to 800GE interfaces from the Netherlands to the more than 100 datacenters NL-ix operates continent wide.

NL-ix is now able to offer dedicated enterprise business Internet Exchange services by providing five 9’s network uptime, any port at any speed up to 800GE, while consuming less energy and real estate.

Already among the top global Internet Exchanges, NL-ix had previously deployed the Nokia 800GE systems in its Amsterdam datacenters, where daily average traffic regularly peaked above 8 Tb/s in 2023. To accommodate traffic peaks across the entire network, NL-ix will deploy a range of Nokia’s SR family of IP routers, including large-scale FP5-based multi-slot systems for core routing, to smaller IP routers built for edge and satellite-based applications.

Now, with the deployment of Nokia’s 800GE systems Europe-wide, NL-ix is supercharging its network, transforming from a localized Internet Exchange into a European business connectivity platform capable of providing carrier-grade resiliency that supports 5 9’s availability of its network services. With breadth, resiliency, speed and sustainability, NL-ix is uniquely positioned to attract new customers in sectors such as banking, insurance and healthcare who have traditionally relied on exclusive private networks to achieve these same levels of security, reliability and deterministic service for much of their business transactions.

CEO at NL-ix, Jan Hoogenboom said: “Over the next four years, in an intensive partnership with Nokia, NL-ix will be investing heavily in reinforcing its strategic position as the leading pan-European Enterprise Internet and Cloud Exchange. As a robust foundation under it’s single-coherent and carrier grade network fabric, NL-ix will deploy Nokia’s FP5 silicon and 800 Gbit/s technology building upon Nokia’s 7750 SR, with far more speed and sustainable performance, deeply embedded in our fine grained 100+ local datacenter footprint throughout Europe. This technology investment will boost our business transformation allowing us to provide European enterprises mission critical services with the insight and control of our unique Elastic Internet technology from the very capillaries of the European Internet.”

Director of Webscale Business at Nokia, Mark Vanderhaegen said: “We are delighted to work with such an innovative leader as NL-ix as they deploy Nokia’s FP5-powered IP routing technology across Europe. With 800GE routing, NL-ix has a platform for unrelenting internet traffic growth and sustainable business connectivity that sets new benchmarks for reliability, performance and scale.”