 Hey, everybody, welcome to JSA TV and JSA Podcasts. This is the newsroom for data center and telecom professionals. I'm Jamie Scato-Cutaya, and welcome to the floor of ITW 2022. We are live streaming first time in history, and very excited about this, and no year better than this year. It is the 15th anniversary for ITW, very exciting stuff. And there is so much news breaking, so many great companies here representing. And to prove my point further, we have Halil Kalma from Lynx, London Internet Exchange, of course, joining us today. Welcome, Halil, to JSA TV. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure. And we are very excited that London Internet Exchange is here, part of our ITW community. What is your message for the wholesale international community that's here at ITW today? Well, obviously, we're here to talk about Lynx and London Internet Exchange and what we do with our exchanges in Northern Virginia, London, and Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, but also to bring a wider awareness to the peering community. We're part of a very vibrant community. The peering world has lots to offer, and we're here to expand our reach further into the US markets. I mean, where would the internet be without our peering fabric friends? It wouldn't exist, I don't think. So, and also today, you announced big news. The expansion of interconnection services to a new internet exchange points in Saudi Arabia. So I'd love to hear a little bit more about that and any future plans for global expansion that you may wish to share. Sure, it's quite an interesting project that we have in Saudi Arabia in partnership with STC. The announcement we made covers two new sites, one site in Riyadh, one site in Damal. We already have a great existing internet exchange called Jeddah X, which is located in Jeddah. It's the first international exchange in Saudi Arabia. So it's quite a feat and we're very, very proud that we've been able to bring that to Saudi and to the region as a whole. It's quite groundbreaking really in the history of telecommunications for Saudi Arabia itself. So we're very proud to be a part of that. I mean, think about that for a minute. The connectivity capabilities now in Saudi, it's unreal, unreal, really opening up the world. Absolutely. They're at the very forefront of it within the region. We've got a great partnership and just the regulatory views and the viewpoints are evolving and adapting with what's happening in the marketplace and the demand. And yeah, we're very happy to be a part of it. Talking demand, Lynx reported record rates of network traffic growth, particularly in 2021. And the amount of online traffic globally only just continues to grow. So what kinds of patterns or trends are you seeing with this network patterns? So thankfully being in the data business, we always hear upgrowth in consumer demand, which is great, otherwise we all wouldn't be here as for sure. We've seen some very interesting stats. So previously it's been up to around about 18 months that our customers, we call them members, but customers to the outside world would double their port capacity. For the larger players, the CDNs of the larger, well-known brands out there, they would double their capacity every 18 months or so. When the pandemic first started, we noticed a very sharp incline and it was very interesting to see. We saw that level of growth within the first three months, three to six months, let's say, on the exchange, which meant a lot of forward planning from our team, from our CTO and the others in the engineering team, a lot of forward thinking to see where would we be? Because obviously we were planning for this within 18 months, but when such an event occurs, you have to take that into consideration, right? And luckily we still, well, we have continuities in place and everything ran smoothly. So we were still always operating at five nines, which we're very proud to do. And upgrading our members and servicing the community. And you would have thought perhaps that the pandemic hit and there was a huge lift in traffic bias. You're thinking, well, at a certain point, these businesses are going to get their communities, their employees remotely, people sort out educating from home and even Netflix, entertaining yourself from home and that it would plateau. But really 2021 only continuing this growth. Do you expect more of the same for 2022? It's been probably one of the most difficult things to forecast. I'm sure if you ask anyone in this room or anyone in this seat, they'll say the same thing. It's been very, very difficult to forecast from a budgetary perspective, from a ports perspective, revenue perspective, all these things are impacted across the line, right? Because when the pandemic did hit, it was very difficult to forecast which way this is going. Luckily now everyone is back together and we're able to see people in face-to-face formats rather than Zoom, et cetera. So we're thankful for that. But in terms of forecasting for the future, things have kind of plateaued out now back to normal, the normal space that we were in in terms of data consumption. So we are seeing that and hopefully the trend will continue. But if we do have another event where we all have to go back to working from home, we'll be ready for that as well. Yeah, it's planned for the unplannable these days, right? Absolutely, that's the only way we can survive. That is so true, so true. Okay, so where can our viewers go to learn more about Lynx? Lynx.net and you'll be able to view all of our sites where we're located at. If there is an area that you're looking at connecting into Lynx that Lynx isn't present, you can use one of our many connections partners from around the world. We're in 83 countries globally. So if you're somewhere we should be able to service you more than likely. 83 countries globally, that's a lot of countries. Congratulations. Lynx.net, L-I-N-X, dot net. Thank you so much for joining us, Halil. It's been a pleasure. Likewise. Thank you for having me. And thank you viewers for tuning in to JSA TV and JSA Podcast. Remember, thank green and happy networking.