Dear peers,

We're happy to share with you some technical news for the first quarter of 2025!

News

Multipass: A simplified way to access remote France-IX regions

Remote peering has long been available to cities where France-IX is present. It works by configuring a 802.1Q sub-interface on the local port to reach the desired remote city. As many sub-interfaces as remote locations can be created, allowing for fine-grained control of peering policies from a single city. However, this setup requires managing as many addressing plans as remote peering LANs, which can be painful for some players.

France-IX is launching Multipass, a new service to simplify this management. With Multipass, France-IX collects through a Multipass router the routes from remote peers having an open peering policy and announces them to customers who subscribe to the Multipass service. Using a single addressing plan, you can easily access remote peers.

Learn more

Marseille: Introduction of P routers

Marseille continues to see sustained growth across its three PoPs. The increasing volume of interconnections, both between local PoPs and with remote locations in Paris, Lyon, and Toulouse, has led to the deployment of dedicated core routers to support scalable and efficient traffic aggregation.

This architecture optimizes the cost of ports dedicated to transport and enables the introduction of 400G ports both for intra-city needs and wave capacity providers.

A platform similar to the one deployed in Paris was selected, featuring a mix of 100G and 400G ports: 2 Cisco 8201-24H8FH have been installed, one in DRT MRS1 and one in DRT MRS2.

Launching Bordeaux

We’re happy to announce that France-IX Bordeaux is live! France-IX Bordeaux provides enhanced local and international connectivity via the AMITIE transatlantic submarine cable linking the US and France.

To achieve this goal, we installed in Equinix BX1 datacenter a stack of two Nokia 7250 IXR e2.

Servers were deployed alongside network: a monitoring probe, a general purpose hypervisor and a dedicated route-server hypervisor.

10GE, 100GE and 400GE customer ports are available for sale from now on, and all our services are ready to be offered.

Learn more

Deployment of Microsoft Connected Caches (MCC) in Lyon/AURA region

Following the deployment of a first cache instance in Lille in 2024, the rollout continued with a second instance in Lyon. These caches contribute to enhancing regional ecosystems by bringing content closer to local networks.

Equinix PA7 : Replacement of the last Juniper EX9200 edge device, a 400G device installed

An aging Juniper EX9214, in service for several years at Equinix PA7 PoP, has been replaced with a modern Nokia 7750 SR-1, marking another step in network infrastructure modernisation. Key improvements include:

• Compact design: A 17RU device have been replaced with a 2RU one, freeing up significant rack space.
• Efficiency gains: Power consumption reduced by 75%
• 400G support: For customers demand but also for backbone, enabling substantial cost savings in optical transport

With this deployment, the entire infrastructure in Paris is homogeneous, which will facilitate the introduction of new technologies. 10 PoPs now support 400GE technology.

Route Servers (RS) update

As part of ongoing discussions and best practices shared within the Route Server Working Group at Euro-IX, France-IX is aligning its operations with the current community recommendations regarding BGP attributes:

• France-IX will stop supporting “Extended BGP Communities” (RFC 4360). These attributes are considered legacy and present limitations. We encourage all members to migrate to “Large Communities” (RFC 8092), which provide better scalability and transparency. These BGP Communities will be deprecated by June 30th, 2025.
• France-IX is also ending support for the legacy 32-bit to 16-bit ASN mappings used with standard communities (RSASN:64700...64899). These mappings have not been updated for several months and will be fully deprecated on route-servers by June 30th, 2025. Members should use “Large Communities” (RFC 8092) instead.
• More generally, the usage of standard BGP communities will be progressively reduced over the next few months. Most features have already been transitioned to large communities, and the remaining ones will follow. Additional details and timelines will be shared as the migration progresses.

We recommend reviewing your configurations and policies accordingly to ensure compatibility with these upcoming changes.

Figures

A few figures about Q1-2025:

New customer ports (including upgrades) Q1-2025: More than 2.6 Tbps of capacity connected!

• 10G: 13 ports
• 100G: 21 ports
• 400G: 1 port

Availability during Q1-2025:

• Lille: 100% 
• Lyon: >99,999% 
• Marseille: 99,99% 
• Paris: 99,991% 
• Toulouse: 100%

NOC service Q1-2025:

• NOC tickets handled: 104

Outages:

• Paris - 6th of January 2025: 88 customers connected on TH2 PoP were impacted by a linecard reboot. The outage lasted 12 minutes. Then, the linecard causing the outage has been replaced during a maintenance slot.
• Lyon - 8th of January 2025: 8 customers connected on IN2P3 PoP were impacted by a software instability during 6 minutes. Vendor was contacted to open a case and try to reproduce the issue. A software upgrade has been performed in the meantime to fix a bug that can be related.
• Marseille - 22nd of January 2025: 7 customers connected on DRT MRS2 PoP were impacted by a defective linecard, experiencing a service disruption during 179 minutes. A linecard replacement was conducted to restore the service.

Upcoming projects and operations

• EVPN and SR-MPLS are planned for upcoming deployment during Q2 and Q3 to optimize the management of the peering LAN.
• Partnerships with French Cloud providers will be available soon to promote digital sovereignty while enhancing local interconnectivity.
• Apple caches will be available soon in Lyon to bring more content in the region.
• To complement the peering offering, Google Verified Peering Provider (VPP) service will be available soon.
• A technical partner capable of performing on-site interventions across all France-IX PoPs will soon be available, improving efficiency in maintenance and incident handling
• Freepro Rock (Lyon) and Cogent Grenoble: These PoP will be closed end of Q2-2025. The few remaining clients have been supported in finding migration solutions, either through resellers or by offering alternative PoPs where France-IX operates in the AURA region.

If you want more technical information, you can follow our large panel of twitter accounts (@as51706 for Paris, @as42064 for Marseille, @as43100 for Lyon, @as47184 for Toulouse and @as62228 for Lille).

Happy peering with us,

France-IX technical team