Significant reduction on telecommunication costs, Direct peering with the largest Internet players in Palestine, Enhanced business opportunities through the PS-IX Internet Marketplace, Strengthened market position towards suppliers, customers, and competition, Increased speed and capacity; improved delay, jitter and packet loss.

BT is starting to roll out services offering speeds of up to 330Mbps while Virgin Media has turned its city-centric cable network up to 120Mbps.

In October both BT and Virgin launched a legal challenge against Birmingham City Council’s plans to build a super-fast broadband network.

The council had successfully applied for European Commission State Aid funding for the scheme, but Virgin Media argued that there is “significant overbuild” with its current network.

There are no details yet about how the money will be split.

The plan is to have networks up and running by 2015, the year the government has targeted to make the UK the fastest broadband nation in Europe.

Linx chief executive John Souter said IXScotland was “a real step forward” for the internet community in Scotland and the UK as a whole.

He added: “The exchange will allow networks to stop ‘tromboning” traffic to London and back again, and will help increase resilience by creating a new centre for interconnection in the UK.”

The report outlines progress made in the last year across all four main strands of the government’s digital strategy.

The strategy includes an undertaking to invest more than £240m in extending next-generation broadband access to 95% of premises in Scotland by 2017/18.

In his Autumn Statement he revealed that 12 smaller cities will benefit from a share of a £50m funding pot.

Ten larger cities were announced earlier and are sharing £114m.

The chancellor also revealed that he expected the Treasury to make £3.5bn from the forthcoming 4G spectrum auction.

Introduction

IXP enables autonomous systems exchange through peering. Peering is known as a method of
exchange between two networks free of charge, although in some cases there are peering contracts
including fees. Public peering is established when three or more clients decide to connect their
networks through one point. This public intersonnection point is called an Internet eXchange Point –
IXP. The part with which the autonomous system, hereinafter referred to as the AS, will establish
peering using an IXP depends on the IXP peering rule. Certain IXPs enable peering between all
participants, while others leave the option for the participants to decide with which client they will
peer. Establishing peering relation with other ISPs (or content provider) is usually due to reduction of
interconnection costs. Generally speaking, an IXP does not interfere with relations between
participants.

Establishing IXP brings short-term and long-term benefits, among which the most significant ones are as follows:

• Delay reduction, since all domestic traffic will avoid international hops.
• Decreased costs of international transit;
• Increased autonomy for local communications;
• Development and growth of the local Internet ecosystem;
• Services, above all e-Government services, become safer and more feasible;
• International content providers can build network infrastructure in the state in order to increase user database.
  

Finally, developed local IXPs can become hubs for regional exchange, where the ISPs from the neighboring countries would exchange traffic.

Before establishing an IXP, we need the support of the community and of the parties interested
in participating in the project of establishment of the Internet Exchange Point. This mostly refers to
the agency for e-communications, as well as operators and other networks with their own AS. Having
the initially agreed framework of IXP operations, it is necessary to make a legal framework for IXP
operations i.e. legal establishment of an IXP, with all the accompanying documents which would
present the principle of IXP operations to operators in a transparent manner, including the contract
proposal with IXP members. The following step is preparation of a plan for IXP development, which
would encompass all parts of establishment and operations of IXPs, technical principles, as well as the
commercial aspect. We have to take into consideration the possibility to bring cables to an IXP by the
operator. It is therefore recommend to select a location which is easily accessible for the introduction
of new links and possibly already established links towards the operator. For operative functioning of
the IXP it is necessary to ask RIPE for the set of Ipv4 and Ipv6 addresses for the purposes of IXP peering,
as well as the set of addresses for public services.