Switch Network

The SWITCHlan backbone entirely relies on dark fiber that SWITCH owns or rents from various dark fiber providers. Through use of leading edge WDM (wavelength division multiplexing) technology SWITCH is able to provide a very high speed and stable network service to the Swiss academic and research organizations.
SWITCHlan provides access to the research networks worldwide as well as to the commodity Internet for all Swiss universities, two federal institutes of technology and the major research institutes. Most sites are connected to SWITCHlan with Gigabit Ethernet or even 10 Gigabit Ethernet.
List of SWITCHlan PoP's
Global connectivity

SWITCH is using three different ways to achieve full Internet connectivity:

* national peerings at CIXP, Equinix and SwissIX. International peering at AMS-IX
* GEANT2, providing access to the research and educational community worldwide
* global transit, provided by Global Crossing (Geneva), Swisscom (Geneva and Zurich) and Telia (Zurich)

The list above is given in order of decreasing preference. National peerings give the shortest round trip delays and thus usually the best performance.