 To JSA TV, the newsroom for tech and telecom professionals, and JSA Radio, the voice for tech and telecom on iHeart Radio. I'm Jamie Scott-Oktahia of JSA here at beautiful Honolulu, Hawaii at PTC 2017. Standing here with my friend, Mr. Ben Hedges, he's the CEO of the Americas for Lynx. Ben, welcome to JSA TV. Thanks, Jamie. Thanks for having us here. A beautiful day, beautiful country, and we're going to make this really short and sweet so that we can get back outside and join the sunshine. Exactly. The sun is shining here, and our viewers really want to know. Tell us a little bit about Lynx and some of your latest news. Okay. Well, Lynx, our long name, our official name, is the London Internet Exchange. So not to be confused with other Lynx that you might find out there. We are a mutual not-for-profit IXP, Internet Exchange Operator. Headquartered out of London, and we've got five exchanges in the UK. So we cover London, that's where the largest exchanges, but we also have exchanges in Edinburgh, Manchester, and Cardiff. And then we operate an exchange over here in the US on the east coast in Ashburn, Virginia. Right. Right. So many folks may not realize that you guys have been around since 1994, seriously a pioneer in the peering community, and you have over 770 members from your two plus decades a year of growth. So tell us a little bit about your rich history. Yeah. I mean, our history is based around our founders, so five UK ISPs, who essentially were tired of their traffic tromboning to and from the US. So they got together and decided they wanted to exchange traffic locally in the UK, but without having to have any one of them owning the operation. So Lynx was established as a mutual organization, which meant everybody has a single share reach, they have a single vote each, and that there are no profits derived from the business. Any surplus we make goes back into the organization to improve the infrastructure, or to drive the cost down for the members. So over time, that's grown. We began, for the first couple of years, being quite a close shop. It was ISPs only, needs to be a UK, telco, ISP operator to get in and join the club. That changed in around 1997 when content and the BBC was right behind this, wanted to come and peer. And so they encouraged us and encouraged the membership to change how we allowed people to come and participate in peer, and so content then started to come and peer. And you started to see the interconnect that you get today, and over time as the internet grows, organizations like Google established and came in and started to peer, you start to see scale grow. And where we are today in London is a long way from where we ever anticipated being. We always anticipated being a local exchange for local traffic. London is now one of the biggest peering points in the world. It's actually an international peering point. And we find networks from Africa, Asia, the US all come up into London, do their BGP in London, and then take their traffic back to where it needs to originate from. So we spent a long time trying to figure out how we could go back to our roots of keeping traffic local. And the regional exchanges that we've now got around the UK go a partway to do that. So traffic doesn't have the trambone from Scotland down to London and back again, or Manchester and back again. So we grew, and our membership now consists of, you said 770, we're actually 777, but that's our magic number for this week, and hopefully it will be a different number next week. But of those, around half are from outside of the UK. So with that international membership, we got an approach to put an exchange outside of the UK. Something that we took to our members to vote on, is this something you'd like to see? And there was sufficient demand, particularly from the US networks, that we came and put the exchange in Northern Virginia. The main driver for that is that it's one of the most connected places on the planet, Ashburn, a bit like London. However, there's only a single exchange there, really. So almost every other major market in the world, there are two exchanges, networks like to have some redundancy and resilience. And so the members said to us, can you come here? Because we've got a single point of failure, you know, we like where we are, we don't want to move out, but we want to have something else that we can back into. And so we put that exchange there. So we've been running that exchange now for just over two years, starting to build some critical mass and starting to try and make a difference in the marketplace there and try and give people a few more options. Well, we're glad to have you in our Virginia homeland there. So what I've really, when going to your links website and knowing you, of course, in the industry for so many years, what I really learned about links is that you foster this member community. Can you tell our viewers a little bit about that? Yeah, as I was talking about in the history, our roots are all about the membership and the community. So that is critical to absolutely everything we do. We don't do any key decisions, make any key changes without going to the membership. Our board is an elected board. So they're elected from the community. They serve three year terms with a term limit of nine years. So every year they're rotating, people step down, they can re-stand the game. So the community essentially runs the operation. You have the executive team and the staff who do the day-to-day operations, but ultimately it comes down to the community and they drive the exchange in the direction they want it. I just love that. I love that. And for our viewers who may not know, where can they go for more information? They can go to our website, links.net, and pick up information on any of the regional exchanges. You can go through, pick any of the regional lands, including the links Nova, land in the USA here. Get details of how you can connect into us. It doesn't have to be a physical connection. So we've got lots of partners who are able to bring people in remotely, take partial ports and peer in that way. And lots of data center partners. So in London we've got 11 locations you could, if you want to physically pop, go to. In Virginia we've got three different locations you can go to. So go to links.net and you'll be able to find out more there. Links.net, there you go. Ben, thank you. Such a pleasure. And thank you viewers for tuning in to JSA TV.