LINX Membership Unchanged.

Membership of The London Internet Exchange (LINX) -- which handles more than 90 per cent of the UK's Internet data flow -- has peaked at 120 Internet service providers (ISPS) In January of this year LINX announced a new record membership total of 120 ISPs -- but although ten new members have been accepted over the past six months, the total has remained unchanged. LINX chief executive John Souter said: we continue to recruit new members at a very satisfactory rate -- but consolidation in the Interact industry, which has led to several of our members merging or acquiring one another, means that we are not seeing any real growth in our membership numbers. "We are, however, seeing phenomenal growth in the amount of traffic which our members are passing through LINX facilities. "The merger of two members does not mean any reduction in the data they are handling. The combined effects of the increase in Interact traffic handled by existing members and the continued expansion of our membership base means we are now handling twice as much data as we were only eight months ago.'

LINX is a not-for-profit organisation which connects the networks of its member ISPS, allowing entails and other Interact traffic to pass from one end-user to another. At peak times LINX is now facilitating transmission 7 Gbits of data per second -- the equivalent of 420,000 average e-mail messages per second.

The ten ISPs which have recently been voted into membership are from Spain (Intelideas), Italy (Telecon Italia), the USA (Digital Island, Nominum and 360Networks) and the UK (Netbenefit, Firstnet, Yahoo UK, Akhter Computers and Equant). Each now owns an equal share of LINX -- the largest Interact exchange point in Europe.

www.linx.net