NL-ix Transit

NL-ix Transit is a truly unique service: it provides access to the entire Internet, but where possible it uses any of the ~2.400 member networks that are connected by the NL-ix low latency network to drop the traffic directly into its destination network. It is our experience that this typically covers ~95% of an enterprise's traffic with the fastest routes possible. This means that, for instance, your Microsoft traffic reaches its destination with the shortest path possible, without any other network in between that can ‘disturb’ the traffic in the broadest sense. For the remaining ~5% of traffic, NL-ix uses a combination of multiple Transit upstreams, so even for Transit the best route (shortest AS-path) is selected. Furthermore: NL-ix Transit is accompanied by a web-based portal that shows the traffic streams from your network to all destination networks (peers), so you can actually see where your traffic is going!

When a network router receives a request, it consults its routing table to determine the shortest path to the requested information. Based on the available information, the router forwards the request to the next router in its path towards the end destination. Each router makes its routing decisions based on its own knowledge and information. If there is a direct Peering relationship with the destination network, it will be utilised. However, if such a direct link is absent, the data is sent through intermediary routers and networks until it reaches its final destination. This process is commonly referred to as IP Transit. It's important to note that each router along the way introduces processing time, leading to increased latency and uncertainty about the path the data will take. Regardless of how your business is connected to the Internet, you will inevitably rely on IP Transit to some extent. However, to achieve a more predictable and direct path, it is advantageous to leverage direct peering relationships whenever possible, minimizing the number of hops and reducing latency.

NL-ix Transit selects the best routes towards each prefix across Peering, Open Peering and full Transit. In practice this implies that the order of the preference is: NL-ix peers >Open Peering >Joint Transit, based on _shortest_ as path. This method of route selection also has built-in resilience: If an NL-ix peer goes down making their prefixes unavailable, the customer will still receive the prefix, but this time with a next-hop via Open Peering or else via one of the multiple Transit upstreams of NL-ix.

NL-ix Transit is accompanied by ICON, a web-based portal that shows the traffic streams from your network to all destination networks (peers), traffic volumes, latencies, historical data, bandwidths. As SaaS applications are borderless, you’d not be the first to be completely surprised to find out your mission critical app is running somewhere outside the EU or that the security software hairpins all traffic into a far-off destination. Gaining real-time insight into traffic flows, allows to find hick-ups and make well-founded decisions on software and the impact on traffic routes.

NL-ix Transit is available at all datacenters NL-ix is present in. As NL-ix operates a full-meshed network topology, your traffic will not be hair-pinned to other datacenters, therefore reducing latency and the amount of SPOFs.

NL-ix is datacenter neutral, and works with a wide variety of datacenter operators: customers have the freedom to select and/or change their datacenter location. NL-ix supports shifting all interconnection services from one datacenter operator to another, which makes changing datacenters easy and prevents lock in.