IXP
acronymISP & telecom
Internet Exchange Point: the shared switching fabric where dozens or hundreds of networks meet to peer in one place.
Brazil's IX.br is among the world's largest by participants; one cross-connect, many peers.
An internet exchange point is shared switching infrastructure where many networks interconnect in one facility, replacing a mesh of individual circuits with a single port each. The economics are what make it transformative: one connection reaches dozens or hundreds of potential peers.
Its consequence is that traffic stays local. Without an exchange, two networks in the same city may hand traffic to each other via another continent, adding latency and cost to both. That is why building exchanges is one of the highest-leverage interventions in a developing internet market, and why IX.br's distribution across dozens of Brazilian cities is a more consequential piece of infrastructure than its low profile suggests.