Promoting IXPs to Strengthen the Internet in the Region
June 30, 2021
LACNIC, in agreement with the Latin American and Caribbean Internet Exchange Point Operators Association (LAC-IX) and the Internet Society, supports IXPs that are at the development stage in organizations or countries within the region.
Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) play a fundamental role in the Internet infrastructure by providing resilience to the network and improving performance in terms of both access speed and latency. This is a collaborative model where different access and content provision networks exchange their traffic at a local or regional level.
Last year, the alliance between LACNIC, LAC-IX and the Internet Society supported IXP.GT of Guatemala, IX-DO of the Dominican Republic and IXSY of Yucatan, Mexico, by providing a server in each case to host services related to the improvement of routing security and stability.
“These servers will help deploy RPKI validators to improve BGP routing security, route-servers and systems such as the IXP Manager platform so as to facilitate IXP routing management and BGP collectors to have information on local interconnection, among other services,” said Guillermo Cicileo, Head of Internet Infrastructure Research and Development at LACNIC.
(Free access, no subscription required)
Interconnection work, traffic exchange and IXPs improve local connectivity in developed regions and promote interaction with very important local communities. The IXP program helps develop Internet technical communities and network operators in our region.
These IXPs are growing rapidly and have adopted an infrastructure in line with best practices for the proper functioning of IXPs.
Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS), are also promoted, as IXPs are becoming a benchmark for the local community. This makes it easier to reach operators in order to implement the required configurations to reduce the most common threats to the routing system.