 Welcome to JSA TV and JSA Podcasts, the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Barb Mitchell, coming to you from ITW 2020. Joining me today is Halil Kama, Senior Business Development and Peering Advisor for the London Internet Exchange, Lynx. Halil, welcome. Welcome to JSA TV. Great to be here. So for those of our viewers who don't already know, can you tell us a little bit about the London Internet Exchange? Well London Internet Exchange, otherwise known as Lynx, is one of the leading Internet exchanges in the world. We have 918 plus members. We're in 81 countries around the world, serving the very core of the Internet on a flat layer too, essentially. So, I mean a lot's been happening obviously in the world lately, because we're saying, you know, we're here connecting virtually for the first time ever at ITW this year. What does that mean for you guys? What's been happening? How's it impacted your business at Lynx? Well at Lynx we have all of the large content providers, telco networks, peering at our exchange. So we've seen firsthand the impacts that COVID has had on the telecom sector in a negative and a positive way. So we've seen members obviously quadruple in traffic and we've seen some members reduce their traffic to the point where it's literally zero, because their business model has changed literally overnight. We've had a few ISPs that serve hotels and things like that that are facing difficult times and we have obviously the content guys or Zoom, etc that are struggling to keep up with demand at the moment. At Lynx we've seen our, which has obviously impacted our ports usage and we've seen our ports increase by about 30%, which is huge for us. That kind of increase is normally expected within a calendar year and we've been able to do that within three months. So it's very interesting times at the moment. That is interesting, amazing really. What do you think the future looks like? I mean do you expect, I'm assuming that, excuse me, you're talking about this a lot and trying to plan for what comes next. What are your thoughts? So for us it's always a case of staying ahead of our members needs, which is higher data rates at a lower cost value. So we're always trying to lead the way in innovation in doing that. For us specifically now that obviously COVID as I mentioned kind of brought us into 2021 in terms of port capacity already. So for us our engineering team are always planning two to three years ahead and anticipating what our members will be using in terms of capacity so that obviously we can serve the membership and to keep up with demand. So for us it's looking at things like port utilizations and trying to predict trends of how data is going to grow and when it does grow for us to be ready and be able to service obviously our networks that are operating at Lynx. A lot of the networks that do pair at Lynx use our exchange for mission critical infrastructure. So they rely heavily on Lynx and our exchange platform to provide services for the everyday user, for businesses across the globe, which with the very glue that holds quite a large parts of the internet together in UK. So with that we've got the heavy burden of being able to forecast the data usage for the people that use our services. So important and what do you think are the key challenges that that sort of offers you? So the key the key challenge is a two-fold I'd say. One is that if this COVID situation is going to go on how long is it going to go on for and will the data need of the consumer change? So from that we're seeing obviously everyone is homebound at the moment worldwide almost pretty much. So the trend in traffic has changed dramatically. When people start to slowly go back into offices will that have an impact on the networks that have already upgraded? Will they then downgrade? That's something to consider but with 5G coming along and data usage ramping up daily really for every walk of life you can imagine from IoT and fridges, cars to everyday data usage on your phone. It's all increasing at rapid rates. So the challenge for us has always been to increase capacity and maintain resilience of five nines across our network whilst doing so. That's the key challenge for us going forward. Well I mean it's so important I'm so thankful to you for talking to us today and telling us about all this the important efforts that you're making to let an internet exchange. For our viewers who want to learn more or potentially connect with you or someone on your team, where can they go? So we attend many events all across the world obviously that's all digital right now but feel free to say hi to the team or myself if you do spot our names at an event. Aside from that you can reach us at links.net and there you'll be able to get information on the many regional exchanges we have. The regional exchanges in the UK such as Lynx Manchester, Lynx Scotland, Lynx Wales. We have an exchange over in Northern Virginia called Lynx Nova and that's for US traffic and our latest exchange which is GDIX in partnership with SDC which is the first international exchange in Saudi Arabia. So it has all the info there on the site. Yeah fantastic thank you thank you so much so so Lynx.net and you know for more information on all of your various sites worldwide really thank you so much for joining us today and thank you viewers for tuning in to JSA TV and JSA podcasts. Happy networking.