AMS-IX rounds up another year of growth and progress

AMS-IX, one of the world’s largest Internet exchanges, has closed on yet another year of continuous growth and progress. It has been a memorable year netting revenues of almost 5 million Euro. This indicates an overall increase of 28 % compared with 2005. The growth of revenues can mainly be attributed to the increased number of 10 Gigabit Ethernet connections (10GE) of the ever-expanding client base of the Internet exchange.

Meanwhile the revenues are low in relation to what the exchange represents in economic value to the IP industry. If economic value is indicated by the commercial value of the traffic being exchanged you could say the exchange grew in value from 18 to 26 Million Euros in the last year. Independent analyst Dan Golding, VP at Tier1Research says “ You could argue that the impact of AMS-IX on the industry is even larger. AMS-IX enables their members to save money on transit, that frees up capital to be spent on expansion, technology, and staff – exchanges are a business efficiency, not just providers of network services.”

In the last few years AMS-IX has seen continuous growth. Currently AMS-IX has 267 connected members on 447 ports. In order to keep the upward line, AMS-IX is constantly expanding and upgrading its platform to enable more 10 GE member connections. Projectwise, AMS-IX launched My AMS-IX.net for its members, enabling them to simply access their personal data and give them the chance to process changes and requests via the webpage to streamline processes.

Active participation by Henk Steenman, AMS-IX’ CTO in the IEEE Higher Speed Study Group (HSSG) was another key activity of 2006. The task of this study-group is to define a project proposal for an IEEE working group to work on a next generation Ethernet standard, meaning a MAC data rate of over 10GE. AMS-IX’ point of view is to focus on the new standard speed as 100GE, because they feel other lower standards like 40GE would not suffice. The standardisation processes time-line would cause the standard to be outdated before it is set.

For 2007 the Internet exchange anticipates another year of growth. Expected is that the strongest growth will come from the 10GE ports while the smaller ports will remain stable. Predicted peak traffic at the end of the year is expected to be above 400 Gbps, the expected volume of traffic will then be around 3 Petabyte per day.

“We are excited to witness the growth we have been seeing over the last few years continue in 2006. We feel we are on track with the long term strategy although we recognize challenging developments in the market,” said Job Witteman, CEO from AMS-IX. “However, we strongly believe we can keep adding value to the Exchange for the coming years.”

AMS-IX