Hello MICE people,
I saw this post on LinkedIn today & thought it may offer some more help and/or confusion to the current discussions.
Mike
Mike Hemphill
ColoConnect
612-812-5242
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[Kurt-Erik "Kurtis" Lindqvist]Kurt-Erik "Kurtis" LindqvistCMO at LINX ( The London Internet Exchange)
How do I start an Internet Exchange Point?
September 17, 2016 • 13 Likes • 3 Comments
I have been involved in helping a lot of Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) get of the ground and I have also been to several countries and regions to help IXPs to prosper and sometimes even to explain to the IXP, the members and the regulators why things have failed. I have helped IXPs in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and even North America. In addition to this I have together with Philip Smith and others thought numerous classes for APRICOTs, MENOGs, ISOC, AfPIF and others on how routing, IXPs and peering work. Because of this involvement I very often get asked advice by people wanting to establish an IXP or even newly formed IXPs.
At LINX we are always very supportive of new IXPs being formed, and we try and contribute as much as we can. For those wanting to start an IXP I thought I would write up some comments that observations I have made over the years and post it here. There are already a large number of resources for new IXPs, and I will also list some of these considerations below.
Establishing the IXP
The hard part with establishing an IXP is not really the technical part, but building up a community and a community with trust with that. Also, an IXP needs to be sustainable beyond the establishment phase, i.e. have enough funds to operate, and in the future upgrade the equipment they need as technology develops and traffic grows. Most IXPs ensure this by setting up a mutual or membership association so that the users of the IXP have equal say in the operation of the IXP. This is by far the most successful model of IXPs today. The members pay a fee based on their port size to the association, so one fee for a 1GE port and one for a 10GE port. Not based on the actual traffic, but the port speed. The membership all have one vote each in the running of the organisation and normally appoints a board for the day to day operation of the IXP.
Secondly, new IXPs tend to believe it is a good idea to offer free ports to large content networks in order to attract other members. At first glance this might seem like a good idea, but you will quickly find yourself squeezed between the content networks and the broadband operators that then also want their ports for free. Generally it is better to charge everyone equally and threat everyone equally. It might make it slightly harder for the IXP to get off the ground but it certainly makes running the IXP easier in the long run. Most of the large content owners are also quite supportive of new IXPs being formed in locations or regions where no IXP exists.
Thirdly, what is very important is to ensure that the IXP does not in any way interfere with the peering arrangements across the IXP. If the members want to for example sell transit to each other across the IXP, that is fine. If someone only want to peer with a subset of the members, that is also fine.
Selecting the location for your IXP
Besides creating the community in order to support the IXP, the other important factor for establishing a successful IXP is the location. Successful IXPs needs to be accessible for everyone so a neutral datacenter, where any fibre infrastructure can be build in. These locations can be hard to find, but are very critical for the success. The wider the choice of fibre providers (or wlan for that matter in some parts of the world) and choice of carriers that are available, the better. Datacenters owned by current or former incumbents are not good choices as they generally tend to be very restrictive in what choice of infrastructure providers they offer.
Besides easy infrastructure access, the datacenter also needs to provide a stable power feed, or you need to ensure you have UPSes and perhaps even generators (depending on ambition, stability of power grid and if the datacenter provides generator power). Also make sure there is room to grow the IXP. You might only two racks to start with, but if you are successful you might need more and moving the IXP is always painful.
What type of switch do I need?
There is an excellent presentation by Remco van Mook that covers many of the same topics as this post, and that also points out that ~50% of IXPs carry less than 20Gbps of traffic. As a new start-up IXP you will most certainly carry less than 20Gbps.
What you need is a switch that will support 1GE and 10GE ports, preferably via SFPs, not an expensive and large switch with massive amount of features (although the vendors will try and sell you one).
Instead, make sure you get a switch that you can manage and that you can monitor. These are the most important components of an IXP switch.
Co-location of services
For the benefit of the membership of your IXP as well as the local Internet community, you should co-locate some critical shared resources with the IXP. The most important ones are
* The local ccTLD slave service (i.e .uk, .fr, .sg, .bd etc). If the ccTLD registry is supportive of the IXP, the contact them and ask if they are willing to locate one of their unicast slaves behind your IXP router. Never connect the DNS slaves directly to IXP L2 domain.
* It is likely that the ccTLD registry also uses an anycast provider for their slave service. In that case it might be worth contacting that DNS anycast provider and ask them to connect to the IXP. You should in any cast contact the DNS anycast providers as they are more than happy to peer at many of the IXPs. Many of these also operate or provide service to one the DNS root-servers. These are a critical part of the internet infrastructure and having one co-located with your IXP will provide a lot of value to your local Internet community. PCH, Verisign and Netnod are some of the DNS Anycast providers that locate nodes around the world.
* Route-servers are also important to offer to your members, especially as you start to grow. The most stable software for route-servers today is BIRD. Providing two route-servers also adds redundancy as if one fails, the peering sessions will go down.
Last, some IXPs offer NTP services as part of the IXP to their community. This is a very good service, and something that the community should make use of. However, for a new start-up IXP, NTP services is quite expensive to provide and definitely not needed at the first stage.
Managing my IXP and members
The guys over at INEX has created an amazing tool called The IXP Manager that provides you all the software you need to mange your IXP and the tools for your members. This is really an amazing resource that you should use for setting up the IXP!
How do I know if my IXP is a success?
What makes an IXP successful varies very much from each individual case. A small land-locked country where all ISPs or Internet Operators are forced to use Satellite capacity for Internet access will benefit enormously from an IXP no matter how little traffic that is exchanged, as each bit is a huge saving! Value of peering is always in the eye of the beholder. Access to one single route or Internet prefix can be extremely valuable to one ISP, while another might need large traffic volumes before it creates value to them.
In the end a successful IXP is defined by the membership. If there is a community that uses and continuous to see benefit from the IXP they will continue to support it. By being stable and sustainable the IXP is successful!
Other resources
IXP Associations
* IX-F
* Euro-IX
* APIX
* LACIX
* AF-IX
The IXP toolkit is a collection of resources for IXPs.
The Euro-IX movie is a great resource for explaining in a non-technical manner how an IXP works and what it does.
You are always welcome to contact me for questions and advice!
Written by
[Kurt-Erik "Kurtis" Lindqvist]Kurt-Erik "Kurtis" LindqvistCMO at LINX ( The London Internet Exchange)
3 comments
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Ivan Beveridge
Seeking network/systems opportunities in…
Typo correction: Establishing the IXP .... "Generally it is better to charge everyone equally and threat everyone equally" - threat -> treat
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Muhammad Aslam
Chief Operating Officer at ADRAS
Great article - mostly the technical would agree with the points mentioned in the article including the Remco van Mook presentation in terms of the technical and costing matrix. The biggest dilemma with the developing economies would be that their consulting partner being ITU that provides different approach towards the setup of IXP , so the question would be how to convin… See more
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Ivan Beveridge
Seeking network/systems opportunities in…
You say "ITU that provides different approach towards the setup of IXP". Can you elaborate? What is their approach?
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Ivan Beveridge
Seeking network/systems opportunities in…
Good article, highlighting important topics and linking to additional resources. I guess the particularly tricky part comes when wishing to setup in areas where there are few/no neutral colocation centres. I suspect such instances need to be treated on a case-by-case basis; is this what you/people (eg Bill, Gaurab, etc) have found?
