Carinthian Traffic Stays in Carinthia
Today, BIK Breitbandinitiative Kärnten GmbH launched ALPSiX – Carinthia’s first Internet Exchange Point and a digital infrastructure hub for the region. Until now, virtually every Carinthian data packet took a detour through Vienna or Frankfurt. That costs money, latency, and ultimately regional value creation. With ALPSiX there is finally a local peering point: cheaper for ISPs, more attractive for data centers, and more interesting for digital talent on the ground.
ALPSiX is owned by BIK and operated by global internet exchange operator DE-CIX. The network behind it was delivered turnkey by Inter.link and EdgeOps – on Smartoptics optical and Arista packet technology.
Our Contribution: The Optical Layer
Inter.link ran the project as general contractor; EdgeOps operates the DWDM layer. In concrete terms: we make sure every wavelength on the fiber between Klagenfurt and Villach arrives where it belongs – and stays there.
The ring consists of two segments: 33 kilometers in the north, 103 kilometers in the south. We run the southern span with Raman amplification, because a link of that length simply would not close cleanly otherwise. Smartoptics muxponders let us aggregate 4x100G into 400G, squeezing the maximum out of the existing fiber. The Smartoptics ROADMs give BIK the freedom to light up additional points of presence along the ring as demand grows – without redoing the design.
On the packet side, Inter.link uses the Arista 7280 DCS platform, the same technology as in its European 400G network. Through the two Inter.link PoPs in Klagenfurt and Villach, BIK can now offer IP Transit, Layer 2 Connectivity, Cloud Connects, and DDoS Protection – provisioned in minutes rather than weeks.
Why SoSmart Makes Our Job Easier
Operations is not a side note; it is the actual job. With the Smartoptics SoSmart management suite we get a single, clean view of the ring and provision wavelengths without CLI archaeology.
The feature that matters when things go wrong: SoSmart turns the OTDR data from the transceivers into a map. When a fiber breaks, we do not just see that something is broken – we see at which meter, and send the repair crew straight to the right spot instead of driving a 103-kilometer route. Details like this decide whether an outage lasts two hours or a full day.
Compact, Cost-Efficient, No Vendor Lock-In
What we like about this project: it is deliberately lean. No oversized design, no experiments, no proprietary dead end. Open optical networking means BIK controls its own infrastructure and does not have to wait on a single vendor’s roadmap.
Digital sovereignty is a big phrase right now. ALPSiX shows what it looks like in practice: a region builds its own infrastructure, with European partners who have done this before.
Thank You
Thanks to the entire ALPSiX team for their trust, to Inter.link for the collaboration as general contractor, and to Smartoptics and Arista for the technology. ALPSiX starts with two points of presence – we are looking forward to growing the ring together with BIK.
The full press release from Smartoptics is available here: Smartoptics press release.