Technology
The first D-GIX was a 10 Mbit/s switch. By the time D-GIX was replaced by Netnod the exchange point consisted of two FDDI switches in Stockholm and one was also installed in Gothenburg. Around 1998, the FDDI circuits were filled and traffic was heavily impacted by head-of-line blocking. At a Swedish Operator Forum meeting the alternatives were discussed. The options were basically two. The new Gigabit Ethernet standard, and a standard developed by Cisco called Spatial Reuse Protocol, SRP. The decision to go with SRP was basically based on the fact that at the time Gigabit Ethernet and SRP had roughly the same cost. SRP also did not have the issue of head-of-line blocking, and SRP had a larger MTU size than what Gigabit Ethernet had at the time. So the Swedish operators decided that Netnod should implement SRP. The SRP rings installed were running at 2x622Mbit/s in each city.
It wasn't soon until the 2x622Mbit/s was not enough. Netnod then proposed to the operators to migrate to SRP 2x2.5Gbit/s, which was also installed. The larger operators all moved to the new SRP rings, but the smaller operators wanted a cheaper method. By 2000, Gigabit Ethernet was starting to become mass-market and the price had dropped compared to SRP. Gigabit Ethernet had by then also implemented jumboframes. Netnod said they were willing to implement Gigabit Ethernet, but wanted 8 operators to promise to sign up to cover the costs. In the mean time some operators went off and created an alternative, Ethernet based IX, SOL-IX. However, Netnod managed to get their 8 customers quite fast and built out Gigabit Ethernet at all cities. For 2 years, the old FDDI exchange (that was still operational) was connected to the Ethernet switches, but by the end of 2002, all SRP and FDDI equipment had been migrated away from.
Today the Netnod platform consists of single chassis Gigabit Ethernet switches at each location. Operators are connected with either 1Gigabit or 10Gigabit Ethernet, with a clear trend of operators moving to 10 Gigabit Ethernet connections.
Read more about this topic: Netnod Internet Exchange I Sverige
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