Equinix Exchanges to Offer 10 Gigabit Ethernet

Equinix, Inc. will roll out 10 Gigabit Ethernet capabilities on the company's Equinix Exchange service in Washington D.C., Silicon Valley, Chicago and New York by the end of 2005, the company said yesterday. The 10 Gigabit Ethernet enhancement enables networks, content companies, and content delivery networks using the service to increase their network data exchange capacity by a factor of ten.

The upgrade comes in response to strong demand for network and content peering service at Equinix, which has seen annual revenue grew by more than 50 percent in 2004. The initial customers migrating to the new service will be Limelight Networks, Time Warner Telecom, and nLayer. Equinix Exchange provides a central switching fabric for ISP and content peering, reducing transit costs by allowing Equinix customers to connect directly to each other, eliminating intermediate network backbones.

Equinix Exchange is currently available in Equinix's U.S. IBX centers located in the greater New York, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, and Silicon Valley areas, and in Equinix's Asia-Pacific region IBX centers in Sydney, Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Tokyo, Japan.

"Equinix Exchange has become a critical element to the infrastructure supporting our strategic peering relationships, and the migration to a 10 Gigabit platform is a base requirement for us going forward in order to support the rapid growth of our content delivery business," said Nathan Raciborski, chief network architect of Limelight Networks.

"After more than a year of testing the stability, scalability and reliability of options, we are introducing 10 Gigabit capacity that will enable Equinix customers to further leverage the performance enhancements and cost reductions of scalable peering, while solidifying Equinix's position as the premiere provider of peering and network exchange services," said Jay Adelson founder and CTO of Equinix.