Do you know what an Internet exchange point is?
I worked at an Internet exchange company in Amsterdam for 4 years. And to be honest, I had no idea about IXPs on my first working day there. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure it out.
Let me boil it down for you.
Let’s imagine you have a colleague called Liam. You work on the same floor at the office and you swap notes with each other. For this, you use a simple paper and ask a special person to deliver it. This person is your Internet Service Provider (ISP).
There are Maria and Anne on the next floor. They also swap notes with each other and have another special person to deliver them. This person is their ISP.
One day Liam wanted to send a note to Maria. But his ISP has no idea where is her workplace and how to find it. Liam’s ISP hasn’t met Maria’s ISP and can’t ask her/him for help either.
Internet exchange point (IXP) can assist in this situation. IXP doesn’t know Maria or how to find her but it knows her ISP and can deliver the note to her/him. It is just IXP’s job to try to sort that out. And then ISP will deliver the note to Maria.
Of course, it’s a simplified description. In other words, an Internet exchange point is a physical location through which Internet infrastructure companies connect to exchange Internet traffic. It can be a very difficult task, there is sometimes no direct route between two participants. Our photos and videos can sometimes travel thousands of miles around different countries to get to the destination.
