Written by Mark Banfield, Transport Product Management

The Internet has changed, today it is fundamental to work and play in the digital economy. And the nature of the traffic carried by our network has evolved substantially over the past 20 years I’ve been involved in the industry.  From gamers seeking the lowest latency to social media users avidly scrolling through content to people like you and me spending half our lives on Teams, Webex and Zoom business calls, the Internet must be fast and reliable or our digital lives just stop.

But that traffic we’re carrying is no longer connecting Western content to consumers across the globe via traditional Tier-1 backbones. Increasingly, content is hosted within region, and the large Hyperscaler Clouds have opened locations throughout Asia and the Middle East. As a result, we’re seeing the rise of a new breed of Over-the-Top (OTTs) focused on Asia with its large, young Internet-savvy population.

These changes call for a different type of Internet Protocol (IP) Transit network. Tromboning traffic via Europe or Hong Kong and Singapore just doesn’t cut it for latency-sensitive applications like gaming.      Since content today is almost universally in the cloud, an IP Transit network must be present in all the regional Internet Exchanges (IXes)and, even more importantly, must be sufficiently open to peering with others there. Many IP networks have excessively restrictive peering policies, meaning traffic is rarely routed locally; how good is the latency when your incumbent IP upstream only peers at a few global locations with a select bunch of peers?

So my challenge to anyone looking to buy or renew IP Transit is to look at your provider’s coverage.  Does your provider have a footprint in Marseille, France and maybe a Point of Presence (POP) in Singapore or Hong Kong? Ask them how they route their Europe to Asia traffic, directly via Suez or the long way around over the US?  

At GCX, beyond the usual locations in the US/EU, we’ve built an IP network all the way from Dubai, Doha, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain & Kuwait in the Gulf to Seoul and Tokyo in the east, via Hong Kong, Singapore and Taipei, i.e. in places many carriers just don’t go. All with the aim to pick traffic up locally, keep latency low and of course do less backhaul to keep our costs competitive.

However, there are still regions with high barriers to entry – both economic and regulatory, making local content hosting a challenge. While in Europe it might be easy to get content hosted in any big city and delivered to eyeballs, in the Middle East for example, I’ve seen many projects fail as it’s tough to get the pieces of the puzzle to fit. 

Here, GCX is the right partner for you too. We operate our own private subsea cable, connecting Europe to India via the Gulf, landing in pretty much every country in between, many having a full IP POP.  Since no single provider is able to fulfill content needs alone, GCX operates partnerships with local providers.      To “land” content effectively within the region calls for understanding the value to all parties and finding a solution that marries the content/OTT operators’ needs with the perceived value added for the local partners.

To learn more about Global Cloud Xchange’s IP Platform, visit: https://subsea.gcxworld.com/