CLOUD & 5G
“ LINX Manchester has been a fantastic reflection on what our regional strategy was all about because we’ ve seen businesses and companies start to use infrastructure up in the north of England and diversify from London, which is great for the UK internet ecosystem,” Richard shares.
“ But when we talk to telcos and cloud players, they want to exchange traffic locally to get their content to customers as quickly as possible. This is why we’ ve gone into places like Kenya, because we want to keep traffic local. We feel that it benefits the ecosystem on the east coast of Africa.”
He adds:“ The conversation with our members is all about how we build the ecosystem to be more robust, more secure and more optimised.”
Connecting the future Looking ahead, LINX’ s relationship with telcos and data centres is set to continue evolving. Richard explains that, rather than rushing to adopt new technologies, the organisation is working to refine its position and focus further into local connectivity.
“ We sit in the middle and have a healthy conversation with both the telcos and the cloud providers,” he says.“ Our benefit is in keeping traffic local and about how we optimise, minimise latency and optimise local connectivity. We think that IXs provide that secure local exchange of traffic.”
The organisation is eager to focus its attention further, particularly when it comes to future technologies like AI, the Internet of Things( IoT), smart cities, 5G and edge computing. According to Richard, despite such an industry push towards 5G and how it could revolutionise the networks, he hasn’ t seen enough innovation yet.
“ A lot of it comes back to the core infrastructure – over the years it has been built, but it is still too focused on 4G,” he notes.“ For the 5G to be sliced and optimised, there needs to be a restructuring of some of the core architecture and that’ s costly. Unless
70 April 2025