I don't know why this entertains me, but I started using Google Street View to take a look at the addresses of the IXs. Some look like Cyberdyne System from the Terminator movies. While some are these rundown single level plaza buildings with tire shops right beside them.
back when i was in college I wanted to be a network engineer and was fascinated with data centers. I use to call them up and pretend to be scouting for cages for my employer (this is long before "cloud" was a thing) and schedule tours. I would get to see all the cool gear, power backups, fiber and everything and they would be forced to answer all my stupid questions like "what is your backup plan if a tornado hits this place" haha. It was really fun.
EDIT: one time I went to the Yahoo datacenter in Deep Ellum (East side of downtown Dallas). I walked in without calling first, asked for a tour, a couple guys walked away from a foosball table and told me they were too busy and went back to foosball, jerks. Although, they probably knew i was just a random geek in the neighborhood heh.
Lots of IXes used to be phone company switching offices way back in the day. The small ones are ugly (cinderblock huts) and the medium-sized ones are designed to not attract attention.
And then there's that unholy behemoth in downtown Spokane, which until a year ago had what can only be described as 20-foot-tall devil's horns on top of it... which by the way is immune from property taxes (check the county assessor's website) yet nobody seems to know why. We're talking about a 20+ story building that takes up half of a city block here.
Are you talking about the CenturyLink CO in downtown Spokane? Google "AT&T Long lines" for more info.
The main IX point for Spokane is not that building, because it's not carrier neutral, but rather is the US Bank building right in the center of downtown.
I'm talking about 501 W Second Ave; the building has changed hands a few times, and you need to use more than just Google to see what's going on. For a while it was owned by some nonprofit called "Telephone Pioneers".
Legally the building is currently a condo: CenturyLink owns a few floors, AT&T owns a few floors. The building is valued north of $9.5 million and yet nobody has ever paid any property taxes on it (except six bucks a year for the soil and weed control district).
Paying zero property taxes is a dead giveaway for undeclared federal government facilities. They're the only ones who can thumb their nose at state tax collectors and get away with it -- and they take such pride in it that they can't resist doing so, even when it attracts attention.
If you view this link in a WebGL browser you can see the spooky-looking microwave horns (since removed):
There really isn't anything magical about that building, somewhat smaller versions or larger versions are in every city in the USA and Canada. It's a CO (central office). If you see a building in a central location with a suspicious lack of windows, lots of air handlers and generators and a few local telephone company trucks parked outside, that's what it is.
Back in the day those were the central points for switching of all analog dialtone POTS phone lines. Now they are of course major fiber sites for whoever is the ILEC (incumbent local exchange carrier) in the city, which in this case is Centurylink.
Other local examples would be:
Bellingham, intersection of Chestnut street and Forest (centurylink)
Everett, 2604 Rockefeller Ave (frontier)
East Wenatchee: on Eastmont Ave, between 10th St NE and 11st St NE (frontier)
Olympia: Corner of Washington St NE and 8th ave SE, northeast side (centurylink)
2323 Bryan in Dallas is accurate i think. I haven't seen the actual IX but use to colocate a server there. The building is non-descript and a little out of the way. The moment you walk in it's obvious that anyone who comes in is there only for a specific purpose, there's no sundry shop, no flowers or fountain or anything, just security and locked doors/elevators.
There's a panel of conduit that comes up out of the ground in an outside loading area offset from the sidewalk maybe 20-30 feet. I really hope that's not the fiber conduit for the building because all it would take is one careless delivery driver backing up into it and lights out hah.
here's a streetview link, down the side street and to the right is where the loading area is. Here's a Dallas parking tip, the meters on that side street get you an hour for a quarter. The meters one street over are like 10 min. for a quarter.
https://www.google.com/maps/@32.786777,-96.7940189,3a,90y,34...
I'm questioning the reliability of this data, at least in the South Eastern United states. The meta data for the building I work at is hilariously inaccurate and the locations for a couple IXs I know about through friends and family are wrong.
One of the things to understand about a list like this is that an IX is often a tenant of a larger IX facility. For example the SIX (Seattleix) is located within the Westin building. It is not its own facility. There's many ISPs in the Westin with PNIs between each other in addition to links to bgp peers over the IX.
Sometimes an IX is in several geographical locations, also like the six, which has an extension in Fisher plaza/komo plaza.
And many big data centers have more than one IX in their facilities. The map is pretty good in showing all major multi-tenant data centers, those tend to have at least one IX present.
They're planning to hook up many businesses and consumers on 1 Gb/s fiber connections next year. As this map shows the infra is already there. The flatness of the landscape and the central location between the US and EU is clearly beneficial.
A lot of people can get a gigabit (or sometimes, half a gigabit (I live in a tiny village)) for years now. In 2016, Tweak already offered 10gbps for 95 euros per month to a small region[1], and recently announced they'll expand that for 89€/month to anyone who currently has access to 1gbps[2]. Their gigabit offering currently costs 39 euros a month.
(Note that the references are unfortunately tracking-walled.)
My server in the Netherlands has had a 1gbps connection for almost a decade. I've had 1gbps at home (in Portugal) for a couple of years and I can reliably transfer at about 900mbps between home and server at any time of the day; Other tests confirm that both backbones are excellent. The Portugal connection is about 50% more expensive.
I live in the US and have Centurylink gigabit fiber at a pretty decent price. Upload speed is always as advertised, download except during evening hours
The funny thing is that in the countryside or smaller cities it's easier to get fibre. In the large old cities in the west of the country, often the best you can get is cable. This is because of anticompetitive (but legal) behaviour of the incumbent telephone/DSL (not cable!) provider.
This surprises me: there is an IX right on the border between Turkey and Bulgaria [1]. All other IXs are located in the capital. Is there a reason an IX would be located there?
The tool would be more helpful if the address were updated with location.replace as that method allows changes to the page address without modification to page history.
I noticed that Fort Worth only has 1 IX and its barely in Fort Worth (directly south of DFW Airport at International Parkway and 183). Fort Worth is the 13th largest city in the country. Its larger than San Francisco. To the contrast neighboring Dallas, Plano, and Irving have several.
For the networking noobs, what happens at these exchanges? Is this where different ISPs all interconnect to each other and to the companies that run cables across the world?
Some of the London ones surprise me. Several on one road in Slough (a town built around one of the largest trading estates, the location of The Office UK), a few in south-east Canary Wharf but none at the BT office directly north of St Pauls and not more in this business park https://www.internetexchangemap.com/#/building/8075
Britain as a whole seems terribly underserved compared to our cousins across the water in Holland. The North east of England in particular is a desert!
This site at least explains why I used to get non-personal 'personalised' banner ads for services purporting to be in Slough...
I'm going to guess that Cincinnati was (is) a legacy central meeting point for many of the baby bells long distance interconnects, situated between the East Coast/New England, the south, and the midwest.
I was surprised by just how simple the 'meet-me rooms' at the core of these internet exchanges were. Basically just fiber from other places and a nice switch...
Yeah, those are the only two peering points in the area. There are tons of other data centers in the area, but these are also exchanges. Fun fact, Markley Group actually owns that whole building and Macy's is a tenant of theirs. I've had a few super weird and interesting conversations with drunk/high people when badging into the building late at night when I had gear in there.
