About our Network
The largest distributed Internet Exchange in the World
Our Network: The core of everything we do.
Our network is the heart of the Internet's core infrastructure. It is also the core of everything we do and as such of paramount importance to us. To build it as fast and resilient as technically possible and to keep it cost effective at the same time is a never ending challenge. And as true technicians we ❤️ a challenge.
20 years ago, when we started NL-ix, we decided to not only connect the main datacenters in the large hubs but also bring our IX to the doorstep of regional datacenters. By doing so we offered smaller and medium-sized networks easy access to our Peering platform. This gave birth to our distributed Internet Exchange.
We quickly recognised that our customer interconnection needs stretched beyond public Peering alone, and developed a complete portfolio of interconnection services. This meant that as well as Peering we could also offer partial & full Transit as well as inter-datacenter Transport services on a single port.
A key factor in this of course was, and still is, our resilient low-latency network that made the instant Europe-wide exchange and transportation of traffic possible. Today our complete portfolio is directly available in over 100 datacenters in Europe. Our portfolio of services and real-time tools continues to grow; NL-ix Transit is now a hybrid IX/IP service giving customers the best of both worlds; Elastic Interconnect is a complete suite of interconnection services for enterprises; and our cloud connections continue to grow, giving customers complete control of their Cloud and SaaS connectivity.
Be the Internet
Being a part of the Internet is not an option anymore. It is a necessity. This has always been the case for our long-standing customers for whom the Internet has always been their core business like ISP's, Content Networks, MSP's and Network Service Providers.
Nowadays being a part of the Internet is also a need for enterprises and other organisations for whom the Internet is perhaps not their native playground. We can help all of these businesses achieve their aims. Although we are an Internet Exchange we do not stop there. We have a full portfolio of services that enables you to be a complete and integrated part of the Internet.
If you rely on the Internet to run your business, Peering on a major Internet Exchange makes your service faster, more resilient and more cost-effective. To maximise the benefits and continuously enhance performance and scale, you need the lowest possible latency, geographically diverse redundancy, real-time control and seamless access to additional peering and routing opportunities.
Fully meshed low latency network
NL-ix has run one of the world’s leading Internet Exchanges since 2001. In 2023, daily average traffic regularly peaks above 7,9 Tbit/s, making NL-ix the fifth largest Internet Exchange in the world by traffic volume. NL-ix is considered among the top global Internet Exchanges, with a unique focus not just on metropolitan ‘islands of interconnection’ but on a fully meshed international interconnection fabric.
Once connected to a public peering exchange, networks can setup or remove interconnections to other networks without the need to physically re-provision any circuits. Peering on the NL-ix VLAN enables controlled, secure and low latency exchange of mutual internet traffic, giving access to a huge range of local, regional and European networks over a purpose-built, resilient, pan-European layer-2 ethernet fabric, which interconnects ~100 datacenters in the most important European metropolitan markets in 7 countries.
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Route Server Configurator
The Route Server Configurator provides full control over the route server by making it easy to select networks you want to exchange traffic with based on latency times, geographical location and black and white lists.
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Network Health Monitor
If you value low latency just as much as we do, the Network Health Monitor is an absolute must!
Find out more about the Network Health Monitor
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Use Case:
Pick-up the content your users want at the edge of Europe
For networks outside Europe it is sometimes hard to get quality access to content their end-users want. Solving this issue usually entails the costly extension of their network to Europe and connect to one or more exchanges.
The distributed character of the NL-ix platform makes this content available at the very edge of Europe. No matter where you land, whether that is Marseille, London, Frankfurt, Berlin or Amsterdam, all it takes is a single port to gain access to the content your end-users want, cutting out the need for multiple ports with IXP's and transport costs to and from these exchanges.
This acces comes in different flavours, you can either peer at NL-ix, gain acces to ~2.400 peering networks on all major European exchanges or combine these services over a single port.