France-IX and Rezopole, the two largest peering Internet exchange points in France, merge. Solutions Numériques asked their two representatives for further details.

Physical infrastructure, the IXP (Internet eXchange Point) or GIX (Global Internet eXchange), allows interconnected players to exchange local Internet traffic through mutual agreements known as "peering". This improves the quality of their Internet speed and limits the number of intermediaries to transport the information.

France-IX is one of the main exchange points in Europe, while Rezopole, based in Lyon, is the largest regional exchange point in France. Faced with international competition gaining ground in France, in a desire to participate in the sovereignty of the Internet and with the desire to expand their presence in French-speaking countries, they decided to join forces and collaborate.

For 10 years, France-IX has been offering public and private interconnection services through its neutral exchange points in Paris and Marseille. It has more than 400 members under its association status, while the operational structure is led by SAS France-IX Services, headed by Franck Simon, whose sole shareholder is the association.

For its part, Rezopole, which has had association status for 20 years, has more than 100 members connected in Lyon and the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, and offers a wide range of complementary peering services. Philippe Duby is its President. Its assets, men and equipment, join SAS France-IX Services, while its members are added to those of the France-IX association.

Solutions Numériques interviewed Franck Simon, President of France-IX Services and Philippe Duby, President of Rezopole. They spoke about the association's status, their customers, the reasons for this merger and future challenges and deployments.

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Source : Solutions Numériques

By merging with France-IX, Rezopole is entering a new stage in its development. The aim of this project is to capitalize on the financial, human, commercial and technical resources of both entities. This merger proves to be a very good opportunity for the future for both parties.

You can consult the various legal documents below:

France-IX Administration List of members	Rezopole Administration List of members

Rezopole parent company financial statements Fiscal 2017	Rezopole parent company financial statements Fiscal 2018	Rezopole parent company financial statements Fiscal 2019	Intermediate situation of Rezopole on 30.06.2020

Minutes of the board of directors of Rezopole of 13.10.2020	Minutes of the board of directors of France-IX of 15.10.2020

Absorption Melting Treaty of Rezopole by France-IX	Draft contribution contract	Value Report	APA Remuneration Report

FRANCE-IX MERGES WITH REZOPOLE AND REAFFIRMS ITS POSITION OF LEADING MULTI-SERVICE  INTERCONNECTION PLATFORM IN FRANCE

This merger will allow both entities to leverage their mutual areas of expertise in order to bring always

more value-added services to their members.

Paris, 14 January 2021 – France-IX, one of the leading IXPs (Internet Exchange Points) in Europe, announced it has completed a merger with Rezopole, the biggest regional Internet Exchange Point in France. This combination is part of France-IX's growth strategy of expanding to national and French speaking territories and strengthening its services portfolio. It will also allow Rezopole to expand further by building on France-IX’s financial, human and technical resources. The combined entity, which will operate under the France-IX name, intends to consolidate its position of leading multi-service interconnection platform in France with a strong positioning on the national territory to deal with international competition.

France-IX is the premier provider of Internet traffic exchange services – also called Peering – in France, offering public and private interconnection services through its carrier and data centre neutral exchange points in Paris and Marseille. Within a few years, France-IX managed to federate the key national and international Internet players on its platform and today counts over 400 members. On the other hand, Rezopole has more than 100 members connected in Lyon and the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, and offers a wide range of services beyond peering services.

“France-IX and Rezopole are non for profit associations based on member subscription, initially created  to build communities and services around interconnection with the very different players of the Internet  ecosystem” says Christian Kaufmann, President of the France IX board. “This merger is based on a  common DNA and will benefit both parties and all their members. 95% of the France-IX members and 94% of the Rezopole members have indeed massively approved it when they voted at our last General Meeting. This is a new step taken today reflecting our will to continuously develop the Internet community  in France”.

Toward an expansion on the national and French-speaking territory

France-IX has a deep knowledge of the French Internet industry and intends to share this expertise with  the entire global ecosystem. After having federated a great number of international players, the group indeed wants to focus on the French market and consolidate its French-speaking contents which are key  to its local and international members. The strategic location of Rezopole in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region (Lyon, Grenoble and Annecy) is a first step towards achieving this goal.

For its part, Rezopole will be able to rely on France-IX’s expertise and infrastructure, its sales force and its solid financial position, and access the biggest national and international Internet players.

In the long term, the new entity will aim to pursue its expansion in strategic cities where the infrastructure already exists, as well as consolidate its presence in the overseas territories and French-speaking countries.

A multi-service platform dedicated to its members

In order to strenghten its role of leading multi-service interconnection platform in France, the merger will allow France-IX to expand its range of services by leveraging on Rezopole’s portfolio and expertise, which includes hosting, NAP, training, consulting and managed services as well as industry promotion. The  combined entity will intend to bring quality integrated and complementary services to all members, especially toward corporate enterprises and international customers. It will thus be able to best meet the needs of organisations seeking to optimise their costs and Internet connection as part of their digital transformation.

Franck Simon, President of France IX Services, says: “Considering our expansion objectives both in terms  of services and geographic coverage, it was today essential for France-IX to take a further step forward.  The merger with Rezopole is perfectly aligned with our growth strategy, which aims to enhance our services offering dedicated to enterprises and expand our territorial footprint while focusing on our real  strength, the French-speaking contents.”

Philippe Duby, President of Rezopole, concludes: “We are convinced that this merger is synonymous with  sustainability. It is a logical continuation for Rezopole who will leverage France-IX’s technical expertise to  keep offering its local services to all the members of the new entity, while pursuing its development on the French market.” Philippe Duby stands as a candidate to join the new Board Committee of France-IX whose members will be all elected next January, 29th.

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To consult the various legal documents, click here.

The Urban School of Lyon continues its conferences entitled "The Wednesdays of the Anthropocene". This week's theme: the impact of digital technology on regional planning with Cécile Diguet, urban planner, director of the Urban Planning and Territories Department of the Paris Region Institute and Jean-Vincent Bayarri, architect of Information Systems at the Metropolis of Lyon.

As a partner, Rue89Lyon publishes a podcast of these forums. Jean-Vincent Bayarri, also wrote the text below.

The intelligent city relies on important digital infrastructures, especially data centers. How are these infrastructures deployed on the territory? What issues are raised by their spatial integration? Constraints or opportunities for an ecological factory of the city? Are digital actors the new protagonists of the urban project?

Initially, containment...

Videoconferencing, streaming, telecommuting, e-commerce, online gaming are in this period of confinement even more widely consumed than usual by the French.

Many articles in the press explain how consumption induced on "networks" alone can be problematic, at the risk of "slowing down" or even "paralysing" the Internet.

"The networks"

Above all, the Internet is a set of interconnected machines, i.e. multiple routes, managed by a multitude of actors: operators, public or private structures, associations, large companies. The term "network" is actually vague since it is a multitude of interconnected networks. At the end of the chain is a server infrastructure that must meet the high demand observed in this period of containment.

While it is true that some networks can sometimes be scarce resources, particularly mobile networks, most are well sized in France to carry the traffic.

So when the website of a hypermarket brand, overwhelmed by the requests of confined consumers, displays a message asking to wait, is it the fault of the "network"? Certainly not.

The problem can often come from the last link in the chain, the "server" carrying the resource and the content consumed. How do you know when and where to align sufficient resources to meet demand?

Datacenters

This is the importance of data centers, since they allow multiple servers to be quickly assigned to specific tasks.

And this capability also applies to the datacenters themselves! Just as the Internet is meshed and decentralized, the strategy adopted by companies like Netflix is a very wide distribution of data centers: on several continents, in several cities, and even as close as possible to the user, partly at the ISPs themselves. It is also a common practice in most companies to distribute resources across multiple data centers for reasons of security, redundancy and high availability.

Proximity, a technical, economic and strategic asset

Some cities have a considerable asset: a GIX (Global Internet eXchange point), i.e. a local Internet exchange point. In Lyon, this is LyonIX, which is managed by Rezopole. Companies or administrations that wish to do so can connect locally to this GIX and exchange via the Internet "locally".

Thus in the Lyon metropolitan area, a very significant part of Internet traffic is consumed by Google services (Maps in particular). Since Google is present on LyonIX, access is not only instantaneous (very low latency) but also free of charge. The rest of the Internet traffic is sold through the (paying) pipes of a forwarding agent.

Beyond purely telecom costs, the logic of economic development is clear: the more Internet infrastructure is present locally, the more investors are attracted to build local datacenters. This rhymes with more jobs, more value created, and an easier digital transition.

The interest is also strategic, since putting your data in the "cloud" means putting it in someone else's datacenters. A varied and local offer of datacenters therefore makes it possible to keep company data on national soil, in better security conditions (RGPD for example), which represents a certain digital sovereignty.

Digital transition, ecological?

"To save the planet, print this message only if necessary". This maxim could almost sum up the digital transition issue by itself.

Videoconferencing, the development of mobile digital counter applications, these are just a few examples of very concrete applications - made possible by the presence of these infrastructures, these networks, these data centres in the city - which also facilitate the ecological transition.The data centres themselves are working on this with the reduction of the energy efficiency factor or the reuse of heat produced by the district heating of the surrounding area, or even a 100% operation on renewable energies.

The digital revolution has given data centers a now multiple importance (economic, social, ecological) in the city as well as other essential structures. A central link in regional planning and the digital and ecological transitions, which are far from being in opposition, are perfectly complementary.

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Source : Rue89Lyon

It is 1990: the Internet has a few million users and the first commercial companies have recently adopted this new distributed infrastructure.

The routing of network traffic from one region to another generally depends on the major transit providers (level 1). These levels 1 are at the top of the hierarchy, composed of a few thousand existing AS, forming what is called the network of networks.

A lot has changed since those early days, when small ASs paid the biggest for connectivity. This dependence on intermediaries has resulted in transit costs, indirect routes, long round trip times and a general lack of control over the quality of service. The bypassing of intermediaries by direct peering interconnections became the obvious answer, and Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) then appeared as the default solution for establishing connections.

Between 2008 and 2016, the number of IXPs and members almost tripled. At the same time, accessibility via these facilities has stagnated at around 80% of the announced address space (IPv4) while resilience has increased due to increasing redundancy.

In almost all regions, particularly in Europe and North America, IXP members have grown richer with an increasing number of members and greater accessibility. However, the regional ecosystems were distinct. For example, European IXPs had the largest number of members but the smallest AS (in terms of accessibility), Asia-Pacific was at the opposite extreme.

This growth raises the question of the observable impact of IXPs on the Internet. To answer this question, Queen Mary University in London, in collaboration with researchers from Roma Tre Univ, the GARR Consortium and the University of Tokyo, extracted a large collection of traceroutes covering the same period and identified IXPs crossed.

The IXPs have had a clear impact on reducing the average length of access paths at AS level, particularly for large (hypergiant) global networks. Given that these networks are traffic-intensive, it is likely that a large proportion of Internet traffic has benefited from a substantial reduction in the number of AS crossed.

They have also clearly helped to bypass level 1 transit providers. However, their impact on reducing the number of transit links (not necessarily level 1) visible on the route is more moderate.

Despite these changes, a clear hierarchy remains, with a small number of networks playing a central role. It is interesting to note that there is a small group of very central networks, regardless of whether the paths cross an IXP or not.

In addition, the Internet hierarchy has changed: large central networks have reduced their use of public peerings while IXPs have been adopted by smaller and less central ASs. This is probably due to the increasing popularity of private network interconnections (NIBPs), which are generally favoured by AS when large volumes of traffic are exchanged.

Overall, the increase in the number of IXPs since 2008 has had a clear impact on the evolution of the Internet, shortening paths (mainly) to hypergiants and reducing dependence on Tier 1 transit providers.

The results must be interpreted in the light of the constraints of existing data, and there are a number of areas where work is possible. For example, topological data are independent of traffic volumes and total visibility on the Internet is impossible to achieve.

In addition, content distribution network (CDN) redirection strategies are not included in the traceroutes; it is assumed that accounting for the increasing traffic volumes delivered by these networks would likely support these conclusions.

 Read the article

Source : RIPE

LyonIX's InterIXP peering has been strengthened in Switzerland, where a new link has been established with the SwissIX exchange point. All members of this exchange node, spread over the cities of Zurich, Basel and Bern, can exchange traffic with LyonIX members through the announcements available on the route servers.

After the CIXP, SwissIX is the second IXP to which LyonIX is connected in Switzerland. This new interconnection makes it possible to increase the number of Swiss players that can be reached via LyonIX, as confirmed by the establishment of stable traffic since the link was set up.

The Rezopole team is at your disposal for any information regarding this new interconnection. Also check the Rezopole weather-map to discover the other regional and national inter-IXP links!

[French article]

Bits of Networks : Etat des points d'échange Internet en France (extraits)

Qu'est-ce qu'un point d'échange Internet ?

Un point d'échange Internet, ou IXP (Internet eXchange Point), c'est un endroit où plusieurs opérateurs réseau s'interconnectent pour échanger du trafic.

De façon simplifiée, il faut voir ça comme un gros switch Ethernet sur lequel chaque opérateur réseau va se brancher, à l'aide d'un câble RJ45 ou une fibre optique. Oui oui, on parle bien du même genre de switch Ethernet que vous avez sûrement chez vous pour brancher vos ordinateurs, juste un peu plus rapide et fiable (et donc plus cher) [...]

Les IXP permettent de développer le territoire local

Les points d'échange sont importants pour développer le réseau sur le territoire local, puisqu'ils permettent aux opérateurs locaux de s'échanger du trafic directement, sans passer par les gros noeuds d'interconnexion comme Paris, Londres ou Amsterdam. Ça permet de réduire la latence et le coût, et de moins dépendre d'infrastructures qui deviennent critiques de par leur concentration (par exemple TH2 à Paris concentre une grosse partie des interconnexions de l'Internet français...). En somme, décentraliser et relocaliser le réseau, ce qui a des vertus non seulement techniques et économiques, mais également humaines : cela permet aussi de relocaliser les compétences techniques [...]

[…] L'effet de réseau joue : comme pour beaucoup de systèmes en réseau, plus un point d'échange possède de membres, plus il devient intéressant de s'y connecter. En effet, plus de membres présents signifie d'avantage de trafic échangé potentiel, pour le même coût fixe […]

La qualité de service d'un IXP doit être irréprochable

[…] Les opérateurs ont donc naturellement tendance à privilégier les points d'échange bien gérés et fiables. En réponse, les points d'échanges qui veulent subsister et grossir se donnent les moyens d'assurer un service fiable : astreinte 24/24, architecture technique redondée, matériel de pointe, etc.

On assiste donc à la fois à un regroupement des compétences, via des structures comme Rezopole pour éviter de tout réinventer de zéro à chaque IXP, mais aussi à un fort partage de connaissance et d'expérience à plus large échelle, avec le RIPE et EuroIX.

[…] L'ecosystème des points d'échange n'est pas un sujet nouveau, mais il reste fascinant parce qu'il entrelace des problématiques techniques et des relations entre structures parfois très différentes. Il illustre bien le modèle distribué et pair-à-pair qui a fait d'Internet un succès. On peut par ailleurs constater que certains points d'échange sont gérés comme un bien commun !

Si le sujet vous intéresse, le RIPE NCC maintient un blog collaboratif très actif sur des sujets liés à Internet en Europe, notamment les IXP et le peering. Toujours sur RIPE labs, Uta Meier-Hahn écrit régulièrement des articles passionnants sur les enjeux des interconnexions entre opérateurs.

Vous souhaitez en savoir plus, retrouvez ici l'intégralité de cette étude.