What are the selection criteria for Internet Exchange Points (IXPs)?

During my 10 years working with the peering coordinator community, I asked them about peering, their peering processes, and in particular, what they looked for in Internet Exchange Points (IXPs). Naturally, given my role as Co-Founder and Chief Technical Liaison for Equinix, I wanted to understand when and why they used IXPs. I asked for the types of questions they asked of IXPs and I tried to understand their decision process. After hundreds of conversations and taking lots of notes, I had documented the collective peering community view of IXPs. To the ISP and IXP community, the information in this chapter is valuable. In this chapter I enumerate the top ten selection criteria that ISPs use when choosing an IXP, along with the types of questions they said that they ask the IXPs to determine their strengths in each of these critical areas

Introduction

The first thing to point out is that the ISPs generally have the following goals with respect to setting up peering:

The ISPs said that they selected IXPs based on the following criteria:

Let’s expand briefly on each of these criteria by presenting the types of questions the ISPs ask during the selection process.

 

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