LINX LON1 London: remote peering from Poland

LINX is London's internet exchange and one of the three main hubs of the European internet alongside Amsterdam and Frankfurt. LON1 is its primary peering LAN, spread across multiple facilities in and around London, which sets it apart from exchanges confined to a single building. It runs on a membership model and is neutral towards carriers.

Why operators peer there

London has Europe's strongest representation of British and transatlantic networks, plus content providers that treat it as their first point of entry into Europe. For a Polish operator that means access to traffic available neither at domestic exchanges nor in full at Frankfurt. Do the arithmetic soberly though: if your traffic is mostly domestic and regional, the benefit from London will be smaller than from DE-CIX or AMS-IX.

How to get there

• Your own presence: colocation in one of the London LINX facilities, a port, a cross-connect and hardware to service on site. On top of that comes transport from Poland to London, the most expensive part of the whole thing.
• Remotely via AS202520: one connection with us in Poland, while the transport and the LINX-side port are on us.
• Through a LINX port reseller: an intermediary with their own transport layer, worth comparing on cost against remote access.

What to expect

LINX provides route servers, so you will set up a large share of sessions without individual arrangements. Because LON1 is distributed across many facilities, latency inside the exchange itself can be slightly higher than at single-building exchanges, which is worth measuring rather than assuming for latency-sensitive traffic. London is physically further from Poland than Frankfurt, so when planning paths for real-time traffic, Frankfurt usually wins. Current parameters and the member list are in PeeringDB.

LINX LON1 and AS202520

We have no presence of our own in London. We serve LINX remotely: we take the traffic in Poland over a cross-connect, a VLAN at a Polish exchange or a GRE tunnel, and carry it to LON1. We bill download from 50 PLN per Gbps at a 10:1 ratio, and the same connection serves the other exchanges and content networks in our reach, so London needs no separate port and no separate contract.