Nokia continues to make inroads in the Internet Exchange Provider (IXP) market, working with more than 20 Internet Exchange Providers (IXPs), including six of the world’s ten largest based on peak traffic and number of members.
What’s significant about these customer wins is the sheer traffic they carry.
As the local interconnection points for more than 5,000 member organizations, these six IXPs cumulatively transport close to 45 Tbps of traffic during peak times – a figure that’s set to grow as the Equinix Global Interconnection Index (GXI) 2024 predicts a stunning 34% five-year CAGR in interconnection bandwidth.
Several factors, including the expanding digital economy, proliferation of edge computing, and anticipated move of latency-sensitive AI models to regional clouds for local consumption, are contributing to the need for what the GXI calls an Interconnection Oriented Architecture® (IOA). According to the GXI 2024 report, “The economics of data, density, velocity and experience demand localized exchange to move the highest volumes of data with the lowest latency to dense clusters of participants and population centers.”
Nokia has found a home with the IXPs via its FP5 800GE technology. Major European IXPs deploy this technology, including Germany’s DE-CIX and the Netherlands’ NL-ix. Since deploying this technology, NL-ix has shown a reduction in power consumption from 0.8 watts to 0.1 watts per gigabit in parts of its network.
Besides its work with IXPs, Nokia has helped to lead the development of Ethernet Virtual Private Networks (EVPNs). The SROS implementation of EVPN provides IXPs with an ideal toolset to manage the increase in traffic. When Telehouse America selected Nokia to upgrade its NYIIX peering exchange infrastructure in the US, it deployed the Nokia EVPN solution to resolve multiple technical challenges.
Akio Sugeno, Vice President of Telehouse and founder of NYIIX said EVPN solved many of its requirements because it provides a unified architecture in both the control and data planes.
“With our new EVPN implementation from Nokia, we police and control broadcast, unknown-unicast, and multicast traffic entering our network while also rate-limiting ARP requests so they do not flood our network,” he said. “With this same protocol, we can implement load balancing techniques between our edge and the customer’s network to increase resiliency and availability.”
Additionally, the virulent rise in cybercrime has made anti-DDoS solutions critical. Nokia partnered with NL-ix for an industry-first deployment of an anti-DDoS solution that performs mitigation directly on the router, avoiding dedicated scrubbing centers that would push up transport costs and impact latency. Nokia’s AI-enhanced Deepfield Defender actively detects DDoS attacks and then instructs Nokia’s FP5 silicon to block those packet flows without any impact on other router traffic.
To date, Nokia has it has contracts with 23 IXPs and publicly announced wins with Telehouse NYIIX, NL-ix, LINX, LINX NoVa, BIX, DE-CIX, France-ix, ESpanix, LINX Nairobi, TOP-ix, and TREX.
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Sean Buckley
Sean is responsible for establishing and executing the editorial strategies of Lightwave and Broadband Technology Report across their websites, email newsletters, events, and other information products.