Tenerife improves its internet connections thanks to the first neutral point installed in the Canary Islands, located in Granadilla. The Island Councilor for Innovation, Enrique Arriaga, explains that this tool increases the quality of traffic between clients of different companies as it is carried out directly, without the need to resort to those on the Peninsula or other neutral points in Europe. Tenerife is the first island in the Archipelago to have this exchange infrastructure, a key element in the operation of the network that is responsible for connecting the networks of operators and providers of content and services.
The connecting shaft, called Wacix. Next (West Africa- Canary Islands eXchange point) is promoted by the operators Wificanarias and Idecnet and works from this month. Arriaga explains that “the new neutral point is housed in the D-AlixD facilities, the data center owned by the Technological and Renewable Energy Institute (ITER) in Granadilla de Abona.”
The counselor adds that «this new infrastructure and the neutral environment offered by D-Alix, Wacix will allow telecommunications operators to improve the quality of connections». It emphasizes that “the Wacix routes traffic between clients directly without the need to resort to other neutral points.” Sentence: «Its objective is none other than to facilitate the exchange of traffic on the network and speed up communications». The accommodation of a neutral point in the Canary Islands is an old aspiration of the Internet users and operators of the Archipelago with several attempts until Wacix has been launched. Framed in the largest data center in the Canary Islands, D-Alix, the project will be able to interconnect the large and medium-sized operators that are hosted there quickly, easily and at low cost. The first two operators to connect were the Wificanarias wireless networks and the fiber and Idecnet data centers.
Membership to this neutral point is free for 1G and 10G links. The only cost is the internal wiring between the members. The objective of Wacix is to facilitate the interconnection of Spanish operators with each other and with others from Africa, through submarine cables that moor in the Canary Islands. In the first week, the operators’ clients exchanged just over 200Gbytes with latencies of less than 1 millisecond.
The D-Alix (Datacenter for Alix) is a high availability data processing center framed in the ALiX project –with Canalink and the Technological Institute of Telecommunications of Tenerife (IT3)– and is part of ITER.
