Streaming Spotlight: Luxembourg’s Bid for European Data Gateway
“The second phase of Luxembourg’s development began in 2004 with the arrival of AOL’s European headquarters followed by Amazon’s in 2005,” says Kettels. “They sought to take advantage of new European regulations for ecommerce which enabled a non-European company to establish themselves in one European country to be able to immediately connect with all other EU markets rather than having to navigate 27 individual ones.”
Since 2005, the government developed its telecommunications infrastructure to offer nearly universal high-speed connectivity internally and throughout Europe, supported by a large amount of Tier III and Tier IV data centre space.
“Media playout started to change, and it became obvious to us that distribution by IP was the next stage,” says Kettels. “We talked
to local players like Amazon and also to the telecoms and content delivery industry. We recognised that, in order to maintain our status as a central media hub, we needed to upgrade our infrastructure. Since the industry was reluctant to invest for the long term and was still scarred from the dot-com bubble, the government decided to take matters into its own hands.”
Luxconnect, in which the government remains the largest shareholder, was designed to provide non-discriminatory, wholesale dark fibre services and consists of 96 pairs of dark fibre, installed using available channels alongside railway lines and roads, each with a 40Gbps capacity, connecting Luxembourg to Brussels, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, and Paris.
“Essentially, Luxconnect was about redundancy,” Kettels says. “There was no second network alongside that of incumbent telco P&T Luxembourg, so there was no choice for customers and often the files took the same physical path.”
Several other providers now connect Luxembourg to the major European data hubs. As a reaction to Luxconnect, in 2006 P&T
also upgraded its network and started to build TERALINK, with connections to Paris and Strasbourg, France; Frankfurt and Kehl, Germany; Brussels; Amsterdam; and London.
Operational in 2007, TERALINK provides 40Gbps upstream capacity to 15 points of presence. The network can accommodate 88 40Gbps channels for a total capacity of 3.5Tbps. Through TERALINK, Luxembourg-based outfits can connect to Tier I providers such as Level 3 Communications and Global Crossing.
An independent alternative is Cegecom (part of the artelis group) which provides voice and data services to businesses and consumers. The company operates a fibre network with speeds between 2.5 and 10Gbps extensively throughout Luxembourg with connections to Brussels; Paris and Metz, France; Saarbrücken and Frankfurt, Germany; and other European hubs.
Luxembourg even has two internet exchange points of its own. The Luxembourg Internet eXchange (LIX), operated by RESTENA, is a facility for ISPs based in Luxembourg. LUX-CIX, on the other hand, is the country’s commercial exchange founded last year as an alternative to sending traffic to Frankfurt, London, and Amsterdam.
“At this stage, we’re not drawing traffic away from Frankfurt and the other major exchanges,” Kettels says. “We couldn’t pretend to rival Frankfurt or Amsterdam since we are smaller and just starting out, but companies are looking for an alternative to some of the more congested European hubs. A lot of companies may not think of us simply because they are not aware of what we offer. Right now, we have more square metres of data centre space available than in Brussels.
“We have developed into a Tier I city and are now in the phase of developing as a commercial site. Until now, we had no status, but we feel that, given the capacity we have and the feedback we’ve received, … people are becoming interested.”
It mans trade and investment offices in cities including Shanghai; Dubai, United Arab Emirates; Tokyo; New York; and San Francisco, with the San Francisco office being the most active in terms of ICT.