Interoute and Milan Internet Exchange light the way for Mediterranean Market Growth

Interoute will host MIX in its landing station in Bari

on 25 November 2010

Interoute and the Milan Internet Exchange (MIX), today announced a collaboration agreement whereby MIX will have a Point of Presence in the Interoute facilities located in Bari, Southern Italy. As a result of this agreement MIX will increase their coverage in Italy. This project will boost the addition of new members to the Exchange and thus create fresh Internet peering opportunities for both existing and new connected ISPs, Web Hosters and Content Providers. Interoute will offer new interconnection opportunities in the South of Italy, to the fast-growing Telecommunications markets in Mediterranean countries.

Interoute has been chosen to host the Milan Internet Exchange (MIX), providing the necessary resilience and capacity to support the ever increasing Internet and data traffic in the Mediterranean Basin. The presence of MIX at Interoute’s main Landing Station in the Puglia Region will provide Interoute customers with a high level of peering and connectivity options across Italy and internationally.

MIX was founded in 2000 and has since become the largest Internet Exchange (IXP) in Italy. Italy has one of Europe’s fastest growing internet markets in Europe , the percentage of the total population using the internet has grown from 22.8 percent in 2000 to 51.7 percent in 2010, and in November 2010 MIX recorded a new peak traffic record of 67 Gb per second. The presence of the MIX PoP inside Interoute’s main Submarine Cable Landing Station in Bari will support and enhance this continued growth.

Simone Bonannini, Country Manager Italy at Interoute comments: “Interoute’s commitment to expand the reach of its network and to build new communication bridges across regions makes another significant step thanks to this agreement. The Mediterranean has been a building block in our network expansion strategy since 2004, when Interoute started to drive its Next Generation Network (NGN) closer to the emerging economies of Southwest Asia, Middle East and North Africa. Hosting MIX in our most Southern landing station strengthens the reach and the range of services from which customers can benefit from coming to us”.

Joy Marino, MIX President, says: The MIX Mission is to improve the interconnection among Internet players, thus improving the end user’s experience in terms of fast content access, while increasing the overall Internet robustness by adding new interconnection options between Networks. This project will strengthen the role of MIX as a leading Internet Exchange in the South of Europe, and as one of the key network infrastructure points where US and Northern Europe players meet Italian and Mediterranean Operators. This new distributed access Infrastructure, together with the fully owned and managed data centre where the MIX core is located, will position the MIX infrastructure amongst the most reliable and advanced Internet Exchanges worldwide.

Owning Europe’s largest private cloud has driven considerable growth in Interoute’s enterprise business over the last 12 months, as organisations look for a secure and trusted environment to place their business critical assets. At the same time, the wholesale business expanded its network reach to Russia, Turkey and Africa and won business with providers looking to outsource their network management.

MIX nearly doubled its traffic over the last 12 months, and has now more than 89 members connected to its peering fabric. Over 28 long distance Carrier Networks provide data transport facilities towards MIX locations in Milano. MIX is a Euro-IX founder member and hosts also one of the Italian Government Network (QXN) PoP, anycast instances of J, K and I root-name servers, and may ccTLD domain name servers.

ABOUT INTEROUTE

Interoute is the owner/operator of Europe’s most advanced and densely connected voice and data network, encompassing over 55,000 km of lit fibre, 8 Data Centres, 32 purpose-built collocation centres and on-net to another 150 partner Data Centres across the European footprint. Interoute’s full-service next generation network serves international enterprises from a broad range of sectors including aerospace, automotive, finance, pharmaceutical and retail, plus every major European incumbent, as well as the major operators of North America, East and South Asia, governments, universities and research agencies. These organisations find Interoute the ideal partner for hosting content, providing wholesale bandwidth and transit services, corporate connectivity or creating new services. With established operations throughout mainland Europe, in North America and Dubai, Interoute also owns and operates dense city networks throughout Europe’s major business centres. Providing service and support in 15 European languages, Interoute is a key part of Europe’s Digital Supply Chain. The network is future-proofed, endowed with Europe’s largest fibre and duct reserve, and is a leader in the deployment of advanced network technologies, from the ground to the Cloud. www.interoute.it

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ABOUT MIX Milan

MIX is the leading Italian Internet Exchange based in Milano. MIX has been established as a company in 2000, after few years of operation as a volounteer and collaborative effort by Independent ISPs. From this point MIX S.r.l. was born with the aim of guaranteeing neutrality and functionality, in which a large amount of the operators that had contribuited to the creation and development of “Mix” participated as members. MIX own the DataCentre where the Neutral Access Point was originally established located in the Via Caldera business campus, in the west side of the city of Milano. www.mix-it.net