Business Community and centrally located data centre to influence bid for regional peering in Birmingham

Portal Data Centres, providers of regional Data Centre Solutions and sponsors of the LINX Birmingham Consultation Meeting, which was also supported by Birmingham City Council, experienced a positive response from businesses at the recent Birmingham Digital Day, to discuss the possibilities for the City to boost its connectivity by implementing a local Internet Exchange Point (IXP).

Over 60 people from 30 different national businesses attended the Digital Day held at the Birmingham Innovation Centre earlier this month.
One of the speakers at the event, Councillor James McKay, Cabinet Member Green, Safe and Smart City and Chair of Smart City Commission commented, “Birmingham has always been a well-connected city. Two centuries ago, our extensive canal network enabled us to become the powerhouse of the industrial revolution. By investing in world-class digital infrastructure that will deliver super-fast connectivity we now have the opportunity become the powerhouse of the data revolution.

We are one of the youngest cities in Europe with over half of the population under the age of 35. The city already generates £2 billion revenue from its creative and digital industries, which employs over 38,000, where there is a high reliance on reliable and high speed data networks. A new Internet Exchange Point and a world-class data centre in the City would help us to support and attract new data-hungry businesses not only to Birmingham but to the Midlands as a whole.In turn this will help to generate new jobs and reduce youth unemployment which currently stands at 40%.

We have witnessed the importance of Internet peering points in accelerating economic growth, with increased clustering of highly skilled technology based businesses. We see this opportunity as being part of our wider connectivity strategy that goes beyond the production of digital and creative content and supports the establishment of a world class digital infrastructure. I am delighted that organisations such as the Birmingham Digital Day hosts, Portal and LINX, have considered choosing our city in which to invest.”

Head of Digital Birmingham, Raj Mack commented, “An internet exchange point will play an important role in underpinning our digital economy. The City has already attracted significant numbers of innovative ISPs, award winning content providers such as Maverick TV, and is a thriving talent pool for creative agencies, games companies and global technology giants with more than 1700 companies located here such as The BBC, Rare games, Codemasters, Blitz, Activision and Sega. It has become host to a growing number of high tier modern, more energy efficient data centres that when networked together will allow Internet service providers (ISPs) and other network operators to exchange traffic locally and more cost effectively, which can help lower end-user costs, speed-up transmissions, increase Internet performance, and decrease international Internet connectivity costs.”
Derek Cobb, Chief Technical Officer at LINX (London Internet Exchange) a non-profit organisation that was behind the first UK Internet Exchange Point established in London in 1994 commented, “LINX ethos has always been to keep traffic local. Originally this was about ‘the UK versus the rest of the World’, which prior to LINX being established, data would go to USA and back. Now we recognize the increasing potential for regional peering within the UK itself. As data traffic continues to grow, there is more demand for data-intensive services such as gaming, and VoIP (voice over IP) that require low latency and high quality of service, therefore it becomes more important to reduce the dependency on London.”

Ben Hedges, Head of Marketing & Business Development at LINX added, “As we’ve experienced in Manchester, for local peering to work, the community must come together to drive it. We have been encouraged by the turnout and response at the Birmingham Consultation Meeting, and it is now over to the community to continue to take the initiative forward.”

Russel Smith, Sales Director at Portal Data Centres announced that the company would be starting construction on a new centrally located, 2,800m2 co-location datacentre in Aston that could provide the underlying infrastructure to support a new IXP if it were to go ahead, “We believe that there is substantial demand for data-thirsty applications, IT storage, cloud-based services and high speed networks both in the City and across the West Midlands. Birmingham was once the known for its industrial heritage, but now we see data centres as the digital factories of the future. At just 1.5 miles from the City Centre, the location is critical, because we can offer direct access to high-speed fibre links, giving our datacentre extremely low latency and high resilience.

We expect to attract not only local businesses and service providers, but also larger carriers such as BT and Virgin Media and other medium to large companies that rely on data to run their day to day operations.”

Portal’s will be the first truly purpose-built data centre in Central Birmingham that will be Carrier Neutral, have Tier 3 resilence, a 2.8MW IT load and a PUE of 1.3.

Dr Adam Beaumont, CEO at aql, whose data centre hosts the IX in Leeds also spoke at the event, “As well as being a trusted operator, a city centre location is obviously important to house the IX due to the diversity of fibre available. To build a successful exchange you need to foster a strong community of like-minded regional partners. These are the pioneers that are passionate about the Internet and how it can be used to help business and society as a whole. We were lucky to able to foster an eco-system as a result of key partners working together and with the unconditional help of organisations such as LINX. It does take time and collective effort to set up an exchange, but given time, the achievements in regional peering and in industry cooperation seen in Leeds and Manchester could also happen in the Midlands.”