Internet exchange point

There are two ways to reach the rest of the internet. Transit means paying a larger network to carry your traffic anywhere it needs to go. Peering means handing traffic straight to another network that wants it, usually without money changing hands for the exchange itself. An exchange point is where the second kind happens at scale.

Meeting every member one by one is work, so exchanges run route servers. A route server is a broker: each member keeps one session with it rather than one with every other member. The standard calls the result multilateral interconnection "among three or more External BGP (EBGP) speakers using a single intermediate broker system".

The idea is older than the standard, and the hardware in the first attempt dates it. A route server was proposed in October 1995 for members sharing an "ATM, SMDS or Frame Relay" fabric. Nobody built it. In October 2005 the IETF recorded that implementations did not exist and moved the document to Historic status. The working version arrived in September 2016, by which time the shared medium was ordinary Ethernet.

On 20 September 2026 we took every network behind the live addresses on our free proxy list: 7,934 addresses in 1,711 networks. Of those networks, 1,360 keep a PeeringDB record and 1,023, or 59.8 percent, have at least one port at an exchange. Where a network is present at all, the median is three exchanges.

The busiest exchanges for these networks are not the famous ones. Six of the top ten are in Indonesia, which fits that country's 80 exchanges, and the European names appear further down. Frankfurt shows 101 of our networks although the exchange there has 1,019 members in total, so our addresses are simply not where the large European networks meet.

The most connected networks are not proxy networks either. The three with the most ports hold 207, 167 and 105 of them, and they are a software company, a cloud provider and a hosting company. Exchange presence measures how much traffic a network carries for its own business, not what it sells.

A proxy is only as close to a target as its network is. An address in a network with ports at dozens of exchanges often reaches a large site across one or two networks. An address in a small access network may cross two or three carriers first, and every extra network is somewhere a packet waits.

This also draws the map of free proxies. Their networks meet at the Indonesian exchanges, and the addresses follow, which is why free lists are heavy with Indonesian entries. For paid work the useful question is not how many exchanges a network has joined. It is whether that network meets the target's network at all, and that is easier to measure than to look up.