Marco Houwen, President of LU-CIX asbl, welcomed the guests and highlighted LU-CIX ongoing success (cf key facts below) and its contribution to Luxembourg’s increasing role as a trusted content and data hub in the heart of Europe.

He was happy to announce NTT Communication as the newest joining member to LU-CIX.

Simon Waller, Head of Sales EMEA, Global IP Network Division, who was also present at the celebration, said how much he was delighted to be joining the LU-CIX and particularly happy that NTT has been able to develop such a strong working relationship with the LU-CIX team in such a short time. “Since our early plans to move to Luxembourg in 2013, LU-CIX have welcomed us to the market and helped us with introductions to the key people who have made our network deployment in Luxembourg possible. NTT’s membership of LU-CIX represents our commitment to making a significant contribution to the development of Internet related business in Luxembourg”, said Waller.

Luxembourg occupying a highly strategic position in the middle of a consumer market of approximately 500 million people and having this unique location, enables low latency access to the most important European peering locations of Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Paris, and London. “Luxembourg having started to attract the Internet’s largest and fastest-growing content companies and their requirements for high capacity, high quality IP Transit makes Luxembourg a very exciting market for us. This move to Luxembourg fits with our strategy to take NTT’s network into the most exciting Internet growth markets”, added Simon Waller.

Marco Houwen also lifted the veil on the 2014 version of the traditional LU-CIX event which will be called "Luxembourg Internet Days" and which will take place on November 17th and 18th at the Luxembourg Chamber of Commerce. It will focus on three main topics: online gaming & digital entertainment industries, security and data centers.
More information and sponsorship opportunities will be made available in the coming weeks on www.lu-cix.lu.

Marco Houwen finally thanked the LU-CIX’ sponsors and members and especially the sponsor of the LU-CIX 5th Anniversary Drink, Datacenter Luxembourg, whose chairman Xavier Buck concluded by saying that Datacenter Luxembourg SA, recently signed a big commitment in bandwidth capacity with NTT Europe. “We are very pleased to attract an additional Tier1 carrier to Luxembourg. Thanks to the fast growing needs in bandwidth of specific customers (eg: Mega) we finally start to reach a critical mass for Luxembourg that will bring additional carriers and in consequence many more international customers. LU-IX is for us an important element in the equation when it comes to attract carriers and companies to Luxembourg.  That is also why we are very proud to sponsor LU-CIX’ 5th anniversary event!”

LU-CIX key facts:

• Created on February 17, 2009 on the initiative of 7 major players from the Internet & datacentre industries, and supported by the government.
• Start of the peering activity (interconnexion and Internet exchange between pairs networks) the same year.
• 5 years later:
• Traffic picks up to 17 Gbits/s,
• 8 Points of Presence all over the country,
• Strong partnerships with France IX (France) and ECIX (Germany)
• 56 members & sponsors from the national and international ICT sector
• Today, LU-CIX is a gateway to Europe leveraging both its geographical situation and its qualitative infrastructure to raise innovative solutions according to its member’s needs to access other European IX.
• The minister for Communications and Media, Xavier Bettel congratulated LU-CIX and added « LU-CIX contributes to Luxembourg’s success as a low latency hub in the heart of Europe ».