Regional IXP Carrier neutral Midwest fabric
GLIX keeps regional IP traffic inside the Upper Midwest basin, linking municipal fiber networks, regional wireless providers, content distribution networks, academic backbones, and enterprise autonomous systems without tromboning through remote commercial transit hubs.
Every value marked this way is a placeholder awaiting a confirmed figure.
See PLACEHOLDERS.md for the full list.
Ingress Egress 95th percentile
The shape above is a representative daily curve, drawn in the page. It is not a live measurement. Once the fabric is in production this panel links to the public graphing system.
Why a regional exchange
Engineered to remove inefficient Midwest detours and the regional transit cost that comes with them.
Without a local layer 2 exchange, intra-Midwest packets often route hundreds of miles to a distant hub before returning to an adjacent network in the same metro. GLIX bridges those regional autonomous systems directly, shedding the unnecessary round-trip latency.
Members gain multilateral reach through redundant route servers with RPKI origin validation, IRR prefix filtering, and standard BGP communities. Direct private sessions are supported in parallel across dedicated 802.1Q VLANs.
GLIX operates at cost. Port fees are structured purely to recover the facility co-location footprint and optical switch capital. There are no recurring fees or markup on meet-me-room cross-connects.
Primary carrier hotels across the region are planned to be linked over geodiverse dark fiber paths using coherent DWDM transponders, so participants at any node exchange traffic inside one unified layer 2 broadcast domain.
The live roster is published on the participant directory page and mirrored to PeeringDB. Until the first ports are turned up, the table below shows the columns the directory will carry rather than member data.
| Participant | ASN | Port capacity | Peering policy | Primary facility | Route server |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Awaiting first participant | AS-TBD | TBD | TBD | TBD | TBD |
| Awaiting first participant | AS-TBD | TBD | TBD | TBD | TBD |
| Awaiting first participant | AS-TBD | TBD | TBD | TBD | TBD |
Provisioning
A straightforward workflow that follows North American IXP interconnection practice.
Submit your ASN, technical peering contact, and port capacity requirement. The NOC issues a Letter of Authorization and Customer Facility Assignment.
Turnaround: TBD
Present the issued LOA and CFA to your colocation facility's meet-me-room operator and order single-mode fiber patched to the GLIX cage.
Optics: 10GBASE-LR / 100GBASE-LR4
GLIX assigns dual-stack IP addresses from the exchange block. Configure the interface parameters and MTU 9000 on your border router.
IPv4 TBD · IPv6 TBD
Bring up sessions with both route servers. Filter checks validate RPKI origin and IRR objects before your announcements reach the fabric.
See the route server guide
Questions about link aggregation, jumbo frame negotiation, high-speed handoffs, or private bilateral VLANs go straight to the engineers who run the exchange.