BUILDING THE INTERNET HERE ON MERSEYSIDE!, FUTURE PROOFING LIVERPOOL'S DIGITAL ECONOMY, BUILDING A BETTER MORE RESILIENT & LOWER LATENCY INTERNET

This letter is to confirm Liverpool City Council’s support for the work being undertaken by IX Liverpool to build the internet and a digital exchange in the City.

The City Council fully supports this co-operative effort between Liverpool’s tech businesses which will help the City become one of the most digitally connected in the UK and will also
enable the City to attract businesses and investment.

The City Council looks forward to continuing to work with you to develop this important piece of infrastructure.

As a designer, a fast and reliable net connection is essential for services like Dropbox and Google drive that are vital for sharing and backing up artwork.

Remote working is also an important part of the design process, from video workshops with clients to slack conversations with the team.

Regardless of your profession, we’ve all experienced the pains of connection drops and slow internet, so anything that IX Liverpool can do to help improve this, would be welcome and a much needed boost to the local economy.

I work with many micro businesses in Liverpool, many of them rely on the ability to have a fast and secure internet service. For the present and the future, being able to have a high speed, reliable and cost effective solution for the businesses of Liverpool is a must.

To be able to increase productivity and performance for the businesses I work with now and in the future, internet connectivity is central to making this a reality. The benefits of having this in place will not just improve local businesses and their balance sheets, but also the local community by providing them with the infrastructure to do more.

This will have a compounding effect and is why I believe an IX in Liverpool is critical for future proofing the cities businesses and people for the digital age we are living in.

IX for the Baltic Triangle and Liverpool is must for our local economy. Digital start-ups and companies like e-blueprint digital effectively exist online. To work effectively we need reliability, speed and we need to create a more competitive environment.

Liverpool has invested and proven itself to be resilient and proven to the rest of the UK how attractive it now is. The past 15 years of bricks and mortar investment now needs to be matched a the digital infrastructure to attract and keep talent here.

Digital is only going one way and that growth needs to be fostered here in Liverpool with the infrastructure to support it and help create much lower barriers of entry to create and cluster more businesses. We’ve chosen the Baltic Triangle to do this, IX will help this greatly.

As a business owner in the fast growing digital and creative sector, it is abundantly clear to me how much a dedicated exchange in Liverpool could benefit the city.

Our business, like many others, relies upon internet connectivity to help us connect with clients, share work and collaborate with others. Yet without the right infrastructure, we can only go so far and our potential growth will be hampered.

This city has achieved so much since I co-founded my business over 28 years ago, but we can’t stop now. We must strive for more and ultimately, remain more ambitious than ever. A dedicated exchange could play a big role in delivering those ambitions and the future success of businesses in the city.

As the Mayoral Lead for Energy and Smart City, I am committed to ensuring Liverpool has the infrastructure it needs to not only compete with the rest of the world but to tackle the challenges and seize the opportunities that lie ahead. Liverpool needs to continue to be a city that is good for people who work here, live here or visit.

Liverpool has an enviable track record for digital and creative including an outstanding games sector, but also has world-class health, finance, insurance and tourism sectors to name just a few. I know their concerns regarding our internet offer in the city as they are increasingly dependent on high quality connectivity. We are working to improve that on their behalf and on behalf of the residents of Liverpool. An internet exchange would help further reinforce that work.

The Mayor of Liverpool Joe Anderson has made it clear that he sees improved connectivity as crucial to supporting Liverpool’s renaissance – not only for businesses and communities but also to help deliver the public services of the future. We believe that Liverpool should have internet connectivity that is on a par with anywhere else in the world. To do that, the reduced latency that a Liverpool-based internet exchange can provide makes perfect sense and I pledge to support it in any way I can.

Having low latency data, and a local, internet exchange makes so much sense! As internet traffic continues to increase, why use up valuable global bandwidth bouncing data across large distances unnecessarily!?

The internet is becoming ever more important for all our types of communication – social, financial, business, industry, learning etc. etc., and we cannot risk being left behind and limited in what we can do because of lack of infrastructure.

What is perhaps only inconvenient now, is in danger of becoming a disaster in the not too distant future. So lets keep local traffic local, so that non-local streaming services and the like continue to be available to us.

An internet exchange is an important infrastructure investment needed to enable Liverpool City Region to not just keep up with global cities but leapfrog them.

We have a wealth of digital talent in the city and a thriving start up scene. An internet exchange will provide a platform for growth of Liverpool’s companies create jobs and improve health and well-being in the region.

IXLiverpool has outstanding potential to place our city at the top of the digital connectivity table, and in turn help position Liverpool as a top tier location within Europe to do real time business.

I run a business that specialises in identifying and addressing other companies’ needs across multiple sectors, and I can immediately see so many of our city’s industries benefiting. From wealth management firms making millisecond trades, to microbiologists maintaining resilient communications channels across the globe, through to developers providing real time VR communications, or film producers getting 4k video into post production facilities across the city. Why would you base anywhere else? And this is all without even beginning to consider new uses that always arise when innovators get their hands on enhanced capabilities.

The internet we use today is the result of emerging needs constantly pushing at the boundaries of its capabilities, spurring innovation in capacity, speed and latency. It’s inspiring to know that Liverpool companies will be at the forefront of using the internet to its full potential, something which is bound to further accelerate the growth of digital companies based here.

The majority of businesses I help are from Liverpool within the Digital & Creative sector, which is one of the fastest growing sectors in the North West. Liverpool needs its own dedicated exchange go make sure these companies remain competitive not only within the North West but globally too.

Having an internet exchange in Liverpool would allow local traffic to be kept local, and result in improved resilience and lower latency. As well as having a positive economic impact, these improvements in the local internet performance would also have an impact on local educators and learners. An example of this is  virtual class room software which requires a lot of bandwidth and low latency.

Using virtual classroom software can be difficult when it involves complex mathematics, issues can arise when syncing sound/video with the interactive whiteboard. An internet exchange in Liverpool would be a potential solution to these problems and allow educators to provide improved support to learners, as well as improve student collaboration.

ScraperWiki do business all over the world. A high quality, low latency Internet connection is vital all the way through from sales calls to working in detail with customers.

As this decade passes, it will become more and more expected to have high quality HD video in international Internet business meetings, and good quality shared screens.

More broadly, I think Liverpool is in a great position to make content for the emerging Virtual Reality industry – we’ve both excellent computer games and television skills already. It is highly
likely the streaming bandwidth and latency needed for HD VR feeds using multiple HD cameras will be vast.

Finally, resilience is really important to me. It happens rarely (last time in Liverpool, being bombed during the second world war!), but every century something big does go wrong, even though I’ve been
lucky in my lifetime so far.

It’s vital that as a city we have control over our infrastructure when that happens – and that at least we can use the Internet locally to communicate with each other still! We’ll be so dependent on it by then.

Internet connectivity is integral to all at Launch22. All of our members rely on our connection for them to complete their various business functions, therefore it is imperative that we can provide a stable and sufficient service.

I believe that the introduction of a Liverpool Internet Exchange and the superior bandwidth it will provide will be a huge attraction for businesses and startups considering relocation to the city. Liverpool has every opportunity to be the perfect place to do business, and this addition will be a fundamental component.

As an electronic musician and digital photographer, internet connectivity has become more and more important over the years. Networking with musicians in the Liverpool area doesn’t have to be limited to crowding around in a rehearsal studio to have a jam – software now exists where we can connect from the comfort of our own homes, collaborate and edit, and hash out the next masterpiece in real-time. This kind of internet-connected collaboration requires ultra-low latencies, to ensure that nothing gets in the way of an artist’s creativity.

At the moment, this kind of collaboration would have all the data going through London and back up north.

A local exchange would open the doors to lower latency, leading to a more fluid jamming experience.

We’re one of the most progressive firms of Chartered Accountants in the UK and we’re based here in Liverpool. Internet connectivity is absolutely fundamental to our business. It’s how we communicate with our clients across the UK, it’s how we get documents approved, it’s how new clients find us and it’s how we research tax issues.

For us to remain at the cutting edge of the accountancy world it is vital that Liverpool continues to have the ambition to be a leader and not a follower.

I can think of no more important addition to Merseyside’s infrastructure than internet connectivity. It would make an immense difference to our economic and our cultural offering and I really hope the decision-makers take it on board otherwise we will be overtaken by other regions and we’ll find it very hard to catch up.

The greater Liverpool region has seen some impressive advances over the past 20 years but we need to be more, not less, ambitious despite the obstacles.

An internet connectivity hub would send an important global message about Merseyside’s place in the world and help future generations realise their dreams; before that happens we must realise ours.

As a small business owner based in Liverpool, SLK Precision Beauty totally relies on the internet, both with the scheduling of bookings on our own website and referrals from many others.

I support the idea behind an internet exchange and the reasons for it. Having control over our own destiny and running things here in Liverpool ourselves has to be better then us being dependant on another city!

Liverpool is now home to the UK’s second-fastest-growing tech community, and it has big ambitions to become a “Smart City” with major benefits for the entire local population as well as visitors to the city. There’s one thing above all which is holding back this dream, and that’s connectivity.

Liverpool needs its own Internet Exchange to solve this problem and bring the Internet directly into Liverpool itself, rather than relying on what is effectively a long extension lead down to London or over to Manchester.

This superior bandwidth and lower latency will bring major benefits to the local economy and permit the next stage of the city’s growth and development, especially as businesses like mine develop and collaborate on the next generation of digital experiences for consumers as we move more towards technologies such as on-demand streaming, VR and whatever else is around the corner!

Internet connectivity is fundamental in all circumstances. For me on a more personal level it helps me correlate work and life. Use of social media and media streaming are a fundamental part of my home life – connecting and watching videos with friends.

My home internet doesn’t make multitasking easy and at times can be slow because of others’ usage – I would like to see this change and I am excited to see IX Liverpool succeed.

Internet Exchange Points are critical parts of the Internet infrastructure. Like airports, they act as hubs that allow the multitude of different networks that make up the internet to connect efficiently in order transport data around the world.

Also like airports, having such a piece of critical infrastructure locally leads to improved connectedness, faster routes and attracts other businesses.

As a startup with a global ambition, Sea Level Research believes that having an IXP in Liverpool will enable businesses like ours to make the city their home and be competitive on the international stage