Voxel expands network and CDN to Hong Kong, China — HKG1 POP now live
It’s said a picture is worth a thousand words, so I thought it prudent to begin my post with a photo of the network rack powering Voxel’s latest VoxCAST deployment, our Hong Kong Point of Presence, or “HKG1” as we know it. Certain of our Asian VoxCAST end users will begin to see their content served out of this location in the coming days…
Our deployment consists of VoxCAST servers and core network equipment inside the Equinix Hong Kong (HK1) datacenter, with infrastructure at the iAdvantage MEGA facility at 399 Chai Wan Road (commonly known as “Mega-I”), to facilitate additional peering and transit connectivity. This POP connects to our Singapore (SIN1) datacenter, as well as to our US and Europe presences. We’re also peering at the Equinix Exchange in Hong Kong, with expansion plans including a port at the larger Hong Kong Internet Exchange (HK-IX).
Part of Voxel’s goal when we announced our Asian expansion plans in late 2008, was to bring rich connectivity and interconnection to our hosting and delivery customers in Asia, just as we’ve been doing for 10 years in our US and European locations. With a much different (and challenging!) network landscape in Asia, we’ve worked diligently to tackle routing and delivery issues that exist due to the complicated nature of nationalized telecoms in the region. Expanding our network to Hong Kong represents a major step in our capabilities in Asia.
Why Hong Kong?
A mere thirty (30) milliseconds away from Singapore, Hong Kong provides access to a wealth of additional service providers, along with an evolved carrier ecosystem. PeeringDB (https://www.peeringdb.com/) provides the casual onlooker with a good listing of providers and peerings in each market.
Benefits to our Voxel Asia Hosting Customers
As our Hong Kong and Singapore locations are directly connected, VoxSERVER and VoxCLOUD customers in Singapore will be able to take advantage of our rapidly-expanding peering footprint in Hong Kong, with several major access providers in the Asia region pending activation (we’d love to tell you who, but pesky NDAs are getting in the way). Our Hong Kong expansion provides our Singapore server customers with the best of both worlds — they are now provided with unprecedented regional (and global) reach, while at the same time maintaining a strong local presence, including access to our Singapore office’s world-class support and account teams.
Noteworthy will be the value proposition of hosting and delivery content to Chinese Internet users — our “gateway into China” in Hong Kong will provide better access to the mainland market, while keeping content and intellectual property hosted in the strong, business-friendly country of Singapore, where copyright and intellectual property laws are well understood and enforced.
A Commitment to Enhanced Routing
One thing our loyal customers have grown to know is that we’ll never stop until we find the “prefect route” between point “A” and “B”. When we first launched in Singapore, we went through lengths to eliminate the classic routing problem of taking a round-trip through the United States to move your packets across the street. This involved strategic vendor selections, in-depth discussions with provider engineering staffs about their respective BGP-signaled traffic engineering capabilities, and most significantly, a major push to establish dozens of peering relationships, both at the Equinix Exchange and over private interconnects. This passion remains strong, and we are now founding members of an initiative to build a new Internet Exchange in Singapore, the SGIX. In a way, being in Hong Kong is less a major leap for us, and more a small and logical progression towards this goal.
If you’re an Asian carrier, service provider or large enterprise interested in peering with Voxel in either Singapore, Hong Kong or any of our other nearly 20 global locals, please contact peering@voxel.net to discuss.
