Internet exchange points are ignored, vulnerable, and absent from infrastructure protection plans

Internet Exchange Points are an underappreciated resource that all internet users rely on, but governments have unfortunately ignored them, despite their status as critical infrastructure.

So says Flavio Luciani, chief technology officer at Italian outfit Namex, which operates Roma IXP.

His position isn’t just self-serving, because according to the Internet Society’s (ISOC’s) IXP tracker, 1,519 IXPs are currently active and have a collective capacity of 2,086,083 Gbps.

As ISOC explains, IXPs “are physical locations where different networks can send traffic to one another, serving as a kind of ‘traffic circle’ for the data that flows through them. So, rather than a network having to go all the way back to its own hub, which might be located halfway across the world, it can use another network to move the data.”