A few days ago, I was talking with Flavio Luciani, CTO of NAMEX in Rome and co-author of a recent white paper on the state of the peering market. What he documents matches what we observe at France-IX: IXPs are transforming.
What we see are 3 profound shifts:
The first: a return to the roots.
IXPs were created to serve regional telecoms operators, local ISPs, banks, public administrations… These players need a neutral, reliable, nearby peering infrastructure. That is the core of the business, and it must not be lost sight of in the drive to grow.
The second: a broader model.
IXPs can no longer settle for being passive exchange points. They must become service platforms better suited to the needs of a digital infrastructure: public peering, private interconnections, edge computing, value-added services.
The third: a deeper strategic role.
More sovereignty and national resilience, which means less dependence on numerous and unknown routes or equipment. I mentioned this in Tuesday’s post, with the example of Pakistan in particular.
All this gives IXPs an increasingly strategic role.
The accelerating realisation of strategic sovereignty issues among Internet players and companies at large is driving this turning point.
This heightened exposure of our vulnerabilities means there is still time, while attacks and weak points are coming to light (and before the storm breaks).
France-IX began this shift 2 years ago, and 2026 is the year all these changes come to fruition:
- more resilience: a second peering LAN, sealed off from the first, on a separate hardware and software platform;
- stronger cooperation with international and national players for a more robust mesh;
- more sovereignty: direct interconnections with European cloud players, hosting in our racks, at the heart of the sovereign internet we are helping to build;
- and still the same reliability, the same performance, the same level of operational excellence.
We are not making this shift alone. It is being built with the operators, companies and institutions who understand that local interconnection infrastructure is now a strategic issue. If you share this conviction, let’s talk.
Peering Essentiel
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