Guide To Amsterdam For Subsea Cable & Terrestrial Customers

When you come to Europe, you go to Amsterdam. It's inevitable. Amsterdam is one of Europe's two main Internet hub, the other being Frankfurt. Also the city is a major logistics hub that is a good hunting ground for commercial telecom deals.

1. AM5 is one of the best data centers for Internet peering, but has no power for new clients or upgrades for existing ones. Novation is your best bet. 

2. AM3, Nikhef, and AMS17 do have power. 

3. Nikhef is the best deal for smaller players because there are no recurring cross connects fees, power is available, and fractional racks have no install charges. Peering opportunities are excellent with both AMS-IX & NL-IX present. Excellent site for both private ISPs and financial trading firms. 

4. NorthC's two Amsterdam facilities have plentiful space to lease. Not a lot of connectivity providers yet, but could prove highly attractive to the server intensive crowd which needs a lot of racks and power. 

5. Relined is highly recommended because their long haul fibre lies in the state railroad and high tension power line rights of way. Outages due to external force are extremely rare. These rights of way are diverse to those used by other Dutch metro and middle mile providers such as Eurofiber or EUNetworks. So it offers a way to achieve physical diversity. Because rail lines are designed to be direct short paths between end points, latency is very low. Governments can use their right to appropriate property with compensation to remove potential obstacles as detours or following meandering road ways or water works. So rail networks are ideal platforms for fibre optic serv services. Relined provisioning can be fast or slow. Pricing is highly competitive. Note that Redlined resells BT and Ultra fibre pairs in the City. 

6. If you are a network planner, you should have at least two Amsterdam data centers lying in different dyke districts. Why? Because if a dyke breaks, all the facilities within that district will be flooded.

7. I have the cheapest Amsterdam metro dark fibre pricing. Also plenty of metro conduits for sale. Contact me if interested.

8. The Dutch carrier i4Networks has an extensive MPLS transport network using segmented routing. Unlike 'old' MPLS, segmented routing has a fixed, predetermined route between end points. Every Ethernet switch-to-switch span remains the same for all traffic. 'Old MPLS' connected end points with flexible and unknown routing that led to variable latency. Segmented routing MPLS is more like a nailed up Layer 1 service. Each packet has a complete set of step by step routing instructions. So Ethernet switches do not make routing decisions, they simply read the packet header and send it to the designated next path. A service like this is quite suitable for commercial clients such as video delivery platforms, governments, and logistics companies.

8. Leaseweb has a major facility at Haarlem, from which Harlem, Manhattan derives its name. It was a former client of mine during my time at Hibernia Cable. 

Map of Amsterdam Data Centres


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