Boston Internet Exchange

New England’s Premier Hub for IP Peering

Hosted at Markley’s One Summer Street and Lowell locations, The Boston Internet Exchange provides clients with a unique IP peering network across a proprietary switching fabric.

Allowing for both low and high speed connections, the Boston IX is designed to optimize network performance, reduce latency, and eliminate the unnecessary costs associated with intermediary networks.

View the full list of Boston Internet Exchange participants.

Boston Internet Exchange

The Boston Internet Exchange (BOSIX) is another reason Markley's One Summer Street facility is the ideal location for an organization's transit and data center requirements. Home to tier one and tier two Internet Service Providers, Content Delivery Networks, and the world's largest and most critical of financial, healthcare, academic, government, and technology firms, the BOSIX lowers IP transit costs and improves network performance. By migrating participant traffic to such destinations as Netflix, Facebook, Akamai, Microsoft Office365, and many more off of your Internet connections to a direct peering fabric on the BOSIX, you can alleviate congestion, reduce latency, and make room for critical traffic on otherwise congested uplinks.

Learn more

See how our rollout of Route Servers & route validation using IRR & RPKI make your BOSIX experience more seamless.

 

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an Internet Exchange?

An Internet Exchange (sometimes referred to as an IPX, or Internet Peering Exchange) is a private forum where companies can peer with one another and advertise their networks and services for access. Instead of saturating your standard WAN link with Microsoft Office365 or Netflix traffic, for instance, you can peer with Microsoft directly and route that traffic over your Internet Exchange connection. This saves bandwidth for other business purposes, such as remote VPN users or other site-to-site connectivity. There are many Internet Exchange points around the globe, and Markley hosts the Boston Internet Exchange.

What speeds are available?

Allowing for 1Gb, 10Gb, 40Gb, and 100Gb connections, the Boston IX is designed to optimize network performance, reduce latency, and eliminate the unnecessary costs associated with intermediary networks.

Why do I need the Boston Internet Exchange?

As your users have transitioned to working and studying from home, the strain on your corporate VPN and WAN connections has increased exponentially. A massive increase in traffic routed through your corporate VPN has caused strain on Internet connections. This causes congestion, packet loss, and latency, leaving little room for mission-critical traffic and other users. Your WAN connectivity may now look something like this:

 

Markley Boston Internet Exchange

 

By peering with providers on the Boston Internet Exchange, you can peel away much of that traffic from your WAN uplinks to a private connection, saving critical and expensive bandwidth. This is what your connectivity could look like as a result:

 

bosix-graphic-2

Which providers are on the exchange?

Click here for a full list of existing peers.

What are the requirements?

You need to have a switch, router, or firewall capable of connecting to our switches with single-mode fiber and your device must support BGP peering in order to form a connection with the providers on the exchange. If you don’t know what any of this means, that’s okay. Contact us and we’ll walk you through all of it.

I don’t have technical staff on hand that fully understands routing and BGP. Can I still take advantage?

Yes. Markley experts will work with you 24/7 to help you get your devices configured and ready to peer on the exchange. We’ll (virtually) meet with you to explain everything you need to know, and will even walk you through how to configure your device regardless of the vendor: Cisco, Juniper, Palo Alto, you name it.

I have other questions.

Contact us, and we would be happy to help you out.

 

Steve Zuromski | CIO, VP of IT | Bridgewater State University

“With our growing use of the Internet, being able to peer directly with the likes of Netflix, Akamai, Microsoft and Apple on the Boston Internet Exchange has been huge for us. For a flat access fee for a 10 gigabit pipe, we avoided having to double our Internet bandwidth.”

Read the case study.

 

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