With a physical point of presence in Geneva, Zurich and Lugano, and built in partnership with IP-Max, Free IX is the first IXP to offer countrywide peering and interconnect services in a single platform. 

Sending traffic to any peering partner across Free IX can be done at line rate from a technical point of view. Free IX encourages the settlement free high bandwidth exchange of network traffic between its members, because it leads to a higher quality and more resilient, sustainable Internet.

Most large Transit providers interconnect usually only in large metropolitan areas. It’s entirely likely that traffic between two parties in Lugano, is sent to Frankfurt or Rome and back. Customers often have very limited control over the physical path their traffic takes. Connecting to Free IX guarantees a latency that is equal to the physical limitations of fiber networks – in other words, it’s 4ms from Geneva to Zürich over a fiber backbone network, so it’s also 4ms between peers on Free IX!

Many Internet Exchanges these days ask for per-month port costs that start to exceed what one might pay for transit, especially at low volumes. This is an unfortunate market effect (the race to the bottom), where transit providers are continuously lowering their prices to compete. And while transit providers can make up to some extent due to economies of scale, at some point they are mostly all of equal size, and thus the only thing that can flex is quality of service.

The benefit of using an Internet Exchange is to reduce the portion of an ISP’s (and CDN’s) traffic that must be delivered via their upstream transit providers, thereby reducing the average per-bit delivery cost and as well reducing the end to end latency as seen by their users or customers. Furthermore, the increased number of paths available through the IXP improves routing efficiency and fault-tolerance, and it avoids traffic going the scenic route to a large hub like Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris or Rome, if it could very well remain local to Switzerland.

IP-Max and Free IX believe in an open and affordable Internet, and would like to do our part:

10Gb and 1Gb Ethernet ports at Free IX, for the foreseeable future, will have no recurring cost. So beyond operational costs such as router ports and datacenter cross connects, sending and receiving traffic from Free IX is, well, free of charge.

Current Points of Presence:

  1. Safehost SH1 Geneva (Chemin du Pré-Fleuri 20, 1228 Plan-les-Ouates)
  2. NTT Zurich (Hofwiesenstrasse 54, Rümlang, Zurich)
  3. Bancadati Lugano (Centro Galleria 2, 6928 Manno)  

If you’re interested in joining Free IX, please send us a mail.