LINX Scotland was set up to help enhance the UK's internet infrastructure with the aim of keeping traffic local. The exchange reduces the dependency on London
If I want to talk to smo.uhi.ac.uk, which is just a few miles down the road here in Skye, as mentioned in various threads some while ago, then I presume that I have to go through BT-land down to London to get to aa.net.uk and then AA routes me all the way back up the whole country, passing through ja.net maybe and finally into uhi.ac.uk’s WAN starting from maybe Perth and then finally up to Skye where we began. Does that sound correct?
I’m unsure about the details because I can’t traceroute it very well - tried www
2.smo.uhi.ac.uk because I’m pretty sure that that server is in Skye, not in Inverness or even in someone’s CDN, god knows where. Also, in the traceroute starting from here, I saw various bits of madness: blocking of pings, so I believe, and even a node that my iPad thinks is in Canada - either a bug in the test tools I’m using or else insane routing by someone.
Musing the other day, I was looking at LINX’s website and I see they have an IX in Edinburgh. How much does that help users in Scotland in performance terms who want to talk to other machines in the Highlands, Hebrides or the Northern Isles?
If an ISP the likes of AA were to have a fit of madness and installed a POP at LINX Scotland, would that be the correct move towards improving Scottish AA users’ performance experience in that scenario? In order to make Scottish AA fans truly happy what would be a next step? Get some (more) big names to park CDNs are LINX Scotland as well? Attract Netflix, BBC, Amazon, Google, eBay, whatever - is that how it works? How does it work out financially? Would it just be a great way of someone like AA losing some money? For the marketing dept, would that attract additional Scottish customers because the ISP could be advertised as more Scotland-friendly? And declaring superior performance and lower latency in Scotland (for certain scenarios) than ISPs that have no local POP and rely entirely on London.
In a case where the likes of Zen have POPs [?] in Manchester and London, how does the required Manchester-London link work ? Or an Edinburgh-London link? Who operates such links ? In these cases would it be LINX themselves dealing with it? Sanity check for self: In the first scenario I don’t see why AA would want to install their own London-Edinburgh link, as currently all their traffic is getting brought to London by either BTW or TT. Is inter-LINX sites’ traffic something that their customers/members don’t have to be concerned about?
I freely admit that I don’t know anything about this stuff so please be kind to a fool.