Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:06):
So we're in central London. We're at the Nokia Tech Day 2026. I'm here with Richard Petrie. He is CTO and executive director at LINX, The London Internet Exchange. Richard, great to see you. Thanks so much for joining us.

Richard Petrie, LINX (00:19):
Thank you, Ray.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:20):
Can you tell us briefly about the scale of LINX, what it offers its members, and just give us a brief overview of the strategy.

Richard Petrie, LINX (00:29):
Yeah, so LINX, we provide internet connectivity fabrics across metros. And so we operate up and down the UK. We operate in four different continents around the world. We connect somewhere in the region of a hundred terabits of access capacity into the internet. We have a thousand members from nearly a hundred different countries all connecting into our fabrics to basically help make the internet ecosystem work as best as it can. As far as our strategy is concerned, LINX is part of the UK critical national infrastructure and we're very proud of the role that we have to play in the ecosystem in the UK. And our strategy is to really build on that and make sure that we are the leading infrastructure provider for internet services across the UK. We also want to expand services into other products that we can offer, things around security, data mobility, but our core business is peering and internet services.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (01:30):
In 2026, what kind of trends are impacting your strategic thinking? I mean, there's a lot of politics as well as a lot of technology that's impacting the sector right now.

Richard Petrie, LINX (01:44):
Yeah. So for 2026 and impacts to our strategy is really about new business coming onto the internet exchanges. We've saw a five, 10 year period where it's been content delivery to consumer eyeball consumption, and there's a real sort of push of value from the content out to the edge consumer. We're now seeing the rise of AI inference, machine to machine, and now we're starting to see the whole value ecosystem across the platform change. And so we're investing, we're building out into more data centres. Part of our challenge is the footprint of data centres is difficult. The demand of AI and compute, the power demand is growing and we're trying to work in partnership with vendors like Nokia, data centre partners and our members to try and make that whole network infrastructure as simple and as flexible as possible.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (02:41):
Okay. So you mentioned partners there at Nokia. What is your relationship with Nokia?

Richard Petrie, LINX (02:48):
So for Nokia have been providing connectivity solutions for LINX for probably eight years now. They've got a great range of products and they're very proactive in working with us to test new technologies. So we connect at very small rates, but we also connect at 400 gig, 800 gig, and when it gets released, 1.6 terabit of connectivity. So we're really at the cutting edge as far as capacity delivery to our members. And Nokia is a key partner in making sure that we maintain that leadership role in the industry.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (03:21):
Okay. And what would you say are Nokia's key strengths in meeting the kind of requirements that you have?

Richard Petrie, LINX (03:29):
I would say their key strengths are they're very customer-centric. So they're very much engaged in us as our business. They understand our business, which is key because they don't just try and sell us a product off the shelf. They like to understand what we're doing. We run events very much like this event and they engage with us throughout that and they're keen to innovate. So they've done some development on open source as well as their own proprietary protocols and services and they worked with us collaboratively on those things. So a really key partner, very flexible, very open-minded.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (04:00):
And what kind of importance does this kind of day bring to the sector and to companies like LINX? Are these key to find out what other companies are doing or what kind of innovations are coming out the industry?

Richard Petrie, LINX (04:15):
Yeah, I mean these days as much about getting an update from Nokia, it's more about hearing from the rest of the industry. So the panel sessions, the discussions, the chats around the lunch and the networking areas. They're the key bits that we really get the benefit out. I get the benefit out of hearing from my peers, hearing about the challenges across the industry and being able to have an open discussion about what the next three, four, five years holds.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (04:41):
Okay, excellent. Well, Richard, thanks very much for taking a bit of time out of your day. As we can see it's a really busy and thriving room here and lots of demos to see so we'll let you get off and experience some of those. Thank you very much. Thanks very much for your time.