The London Internet Exchange (LINX) has announced that Rostelecom, Russia’s national telecommunications operator, has taken the 200th 10 Gigabit Ethernet port at the exchange.

The increased demand for 10GigE ports is due to the need of LINX members to meet escalating bandwidth requirements following the dramatic growth of the global Internet in recent years. LINX already has 685 connected member ports but 10GigE is taking ever-greater emphasis as the membership look to expand their networks still further. LINX was a very early adopter of 10GigE technology with its first switch employed on the Foundry (now known as Brocade) network as far back as 2001.

Rostelecom’s CEO Anton Kolpakov said, “This interconnection upgrade is a direct response to significant growth of traffic in the international segment of Rostelecom IP MPLS network and was implemented to enhance capacity, improve quality and efficiency of telecommunications”.

This growth has seen the share of data and intelligent network services traffic approximately double since the beginning of 2008 and now amounts to 10% of Rostelecom's total revenue.

The strong demand for 10GigE ports enabled the non-profit exchange to reduce the price of these high capacity ports by 7.5% last summer. This continued a run of annual price cuts which has in turn meant that the cost of being a LINX member has decreased year-on-year.

Of the 342 LINX members 111 are now running one or more 10GigE across the exchange. Overall, LINX has more peers, more sites over a greater metro area and access to more Internet routes than any other Internet exchange point in the world.