LINX’s new Manchester location goes live

25 September 2024

The London Internet Exchange’s (LINX) new location on its Manchester network is now live and ready for business at the Lunar Digital Data Centre, providing peering services and more for the local networking community.

The installation of the LINX technology has been completed at the Lunar Digital site, the former Equinix MA2 facility in Manchester, with the installation coming sooner than planned due to the demand for LINX services at the location, following the initial partnership being agreed in July.

“I’m really pleased we were able to deploy this quickly at Lunar, but this is what we do, if we know we have a large member waiting for capacity we will do the best we can to make it happen,” said LINX Interconnection Specialist Colin Peckham.

Traffic at the regional Internet Exchange Point (IXP) has peaked recently at 646.717Gbps and this is anticipated to grow with the addition of a new data centre into the network. Networks located at either of the Lunar Digital buildings in Manchester will be able to cross connect into the LINX Manchester community and access peering services and more for improved performance, increased redundancy and lower network latency.

“We are really pleased to now be able to offer the LINX peering LAN to our customers in our Manchester Lunar 1 & 2 data centres with 100Gig port availability for peering services and more. Having the LINX fabric present in our facilities will greatly improve our customer’s network options,” said Rob Garbutt, CEO of Lunar Digital.

Manchester is increasingly becoming a key digital hub for the UK, with government and private sector investment into local infrastructure, such as a new Manchester Digital Campus set to open in 2026. It provides networks connected to LINX Manchester the ability to peer with each other, regardless of which data centre location they are connecting from, improving latency times and building network resilience. The networks are located at the Lunar Digital data centre campus in Central Manchester.