Public peering
Public peering is the core service of NaMeX Internet Exchange Point. Usually, an ISP joins NaMeX in order to make use of this service.
Member ISPs connect their border routers with the central IXP switches. Over these switches, the ISPs set up BGP peerings with each other; the peerings allow them to exchange traffic between their Autonomous Systems.
The member ISPs are able in this way to save on Internet transit costs, and to optimize their access to all other Members' networks.
Redundant switches
NaMeX operates two switches (Enterasys Matrix N7 and Cisco Catalyst 6509-E, respectively), thus granting the redundancy of the inter-ISP links in case of a hardware failure coming from one of the switches.
The switches support two completely secluded peering LANs, either from a physical and logical standpoint, so to guarantee the maximum independence and redundance to the interconnections.
In order to make use of the redundant configuration, the ISP must have two ports on its router. Each port will be connected to a separate switch.
There is no additional cost for connecting an ISP's router to both switches instead of one: the fee is always based on the used bandwidth.
Connectivity
Switching fabrics support the following Ethernet technologies:
- 10BASE-TX
- 100BASE-TX
- 1000BASE-TX
- 1000BASE-LX
- 1000BASE-SX
- 10GBASE-LX
- 10GBASE-SX
Additionally, it is possible to enable multiple connection with link aggregation (802.3ad).
Supported protocols
Both peering LANs support IPv4/IPv6 unicast traffic. Each member is assigned a couple of IPv4 addresses (193.201.28.0/25 and 193.201.29.0/25 subnets) and a couple of IPv6 addresses (2001:7f8:10::/64 and 2001:7f8:10:b::/64 subnets).
In addition, it is possible to activate multicast peerings on a dedicated VLAN on the secondary switch.
No fees are required for the activation of the service, multicast traffic is added to unicast traffic in order to compute overall bandwidth consumption.
