Shaping The
Future of
Connectivity

This session will provide an overview of the highlights of the Annual Report and Accounts for 2025, and other finance team activities, together with an insight into the management of the LINX Group's finances.

The project started as a successor to ExaBGP and remains a complete BGP implementation with full ExaBGP compatibility. While still experimental, it is now a network operating system written in Go. It can ship as a single binary or as an appliance using gokrazy. It includes a full L2TP/BNG stack with RADIUS authentication and accounting, traffic shaping, CoA/disconnect, and session telemetry. It has a firewall component driving nftables, static routing with ECMP and BFD failover, policy routing, TACACS+ authorization, BMP monitoring, and VPP dataplane integration. Every feature is a plugin that registers once and gets CLI, web UI, YANG validation, and AI discoverability for free. The entire project was built with AI as a co-developer, governed by a system of rules, hooks, and learned summaries that act as institutional memory across sessions. As it is AI-centric, it has extensive MCP support for AI assistants to control it and help debug issues. Attendees will learn what it took to make AI collaboration work for this large project (including the failure modes nobody warns you about), and what Ze could bring to your network.

In January 2026, the European Commission released the draft text of the Digital Networks Act, which contains substantial proposed changes to the regulatory landscape for all types of network operators across the EU. This talk explains the proposed changes for several areas of regulation, including scope of who is to be regulated, replacing the Open Internet Regulation and its impact on Net Neutrality, new telecoms regulator involvement in ecosystem cooperation across a broad range of technology companies, changes to IP interconnection regulation, and more. These changes will have impacts beyond the EU's borders. The talk concludes with advice on how you can get involved and provide feedback to policymakers on these proposals.

The race for companies to develop the next best Artificial Intelligence model means that they need to deploy processing capacity at unprecedented scale. We are already seeing the construction of multi-gigawatt scale data centers, and this creates significant challenges to find sufficient space, power and fresh water to cool these facilities.

Beginning with remarks by Bill Gates as far back as 2014, several technology leaders have outlined plans for massive constellations of orbiting data centers. In January this year SpaceX filed plans with the US Federal Communications Commission for up to one million "orbital data center" satellites. Google, with its Project Suncatcher, is suggesting that space-based data centers could be a reality as soon as 2027.

But how realistic is the goal itself? What are the major hurdles in our way, and how easy is it to get over or around them? Are there some problems that are just insoluble? And how much damage are we likely to inflict on humanity as we chase this dream?

In this presentation, Simon Kuhn (NBIP NaWas) gives practical advice about what is expected as an average DDoS attack profile (noise) and how that attack compares with large events that are always reported on in the press (signal). Furthermore, the presentation gives hands-on examples and solutions on how organisations can prepare themselves against DDoS attacks.

In the old days of traditional separation of IP and DWDM, there was no need for IP folks to care about much other than what they used on their routers/switches. Now in the age of IPoDWDM the bandwidth per channel keeps increasing, as complex modulation schemes come into favour. Those increased per channel bandwidths of 400Gbps, 800Gbps and now pushing into the 1.6Tbps realm demand larger grids to accommodate the spectrum necessary to operate such "Superchannels". IP folks now will need to understand the nuances of coherent detection, the need for larger filters for 800Gbps and higher, and how 400GHz filters would future proof your network by not only allowing you to grow to 1.6Tbps, but also allowing backwards compatibility for legacy services.

Session synopsis to be confirmed.

The UK telecommunications industry is in the middle of its largest infrastructure project of the last forty years, possibly ever, and it's all about fibre. So what technologies will help us make the most of it in the next forty, and what will replace it.

Hear about our performance in the first half of 2026, progress against strategic priorities, and the momentum we are building across LINX.

LINX Annual General Meeting.

An update on key infrastructure projects, from the completed LON2 refresh through to the Manchester refresh planned for late 2026, alongside a look at the role of route servers and the operational considerations shaping performance, scalability, and day-to-day delivery.

Session synopsis to be confirmed.

Join us for the LINX126 Social — evening drinks and networking at All Bar One Houndsditch, Houndsditch, London.