Lumen Technologies (NYSE: LUMN) yesterday announced a new network interconnection ecosystem called ExaSwitch™, created in collaboration with Google and Microsoft. This platform empowers organizations with high bandwidth needs to route their traffic dynamically and quickly between networks, and without third-party intervention.
“The days of slow, legacy cross connects are over; ExaSwitch is the future of network interconnections,” said Lumen CTO Andrew Dugan. “Large network backbones no longer need a physical location to connect. Instead, optical switching will be used to establish high-capacity optical links between metro sites. And it’s so much more than just internet peering; it’s an on-demand network connection for quickly deploying needed capacity across all types of data traffic exchanges.”
The ExaSwitch project was created by the initial participants to route traffic between large internet and cloud networks. Early adopters include Lumen, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and an additional large cloud provider. The ExaSwitch ecosystem will continue to strengthen as additional participants join, making it easier to automate, scale and manage capacity between the members.
The ExaSwitch administrator will install optical hardware at the preferred location for each participant, who will choose their own fiber source for connecting into ExaSwitch. When two participants agree to connect, they can join quickly through self-provisioning, or an API portal driven and managed by the administrator. The real-time capacity deployment allows them to easily order, modify and delete services as needed. Lumen is acting as the administrator for the initial deployments.
Connections are set up in 400G increments and can be consumed on demand in 100G increments, with each site capable of up to 25.6 Tbps of optical cross connects. Participants will have the ability to connect their edge sites, data centers and central offices in major markets to gain diversity and save costs on cross connects.
Lumen is currently operating the ExaSwitch platform in three of the largest U.S. interconnection hubs – Chicago, Dallas and Virginia – with plans to expand to all major markets in North America with large internet hubs.
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