A neutral facility where networks interconnect directly to exchange traffic, whose concentration turns it into a regional single point of failure.
An internet exchange point is a neutral facility, usually housed in one or more data centers, where carriers, hosting providers and content networks connect to exchange traffic directly instead of paying a transit provider to carry it. The arrangement cuts cost and latency, and for that very reason it draws everyone to the same place, producing a concentration nobody chose. A few dozen exchanges carry most of the world's interconnection traffic, so a city hosting one becomes a node whose failure is visible across a continent. The risk is not only physical, a fire or a power cut in the exchange hall, but also logical, since a routing misconfiguration propagates to every connected member. For insurance, an exchange point is the textbook case of geographic accumulation, with insureds who have no commercial relationship at all sharing a dependency none of their contracts names.
The DE-CIX exchange in Frankfurt announced in March 2020 that it had crossed ten terabits per second of instantaneous traffic, a world first for an exchange point, driven by the mass shift to remote work.
IXP, internet exchange point, GIX, noeud d'interconnexion