As more and more of the population work from home, Internet service providers (ISPs) find they need more diverse and faster connections to cloud and content networks. In a corporate setting, the employer can justify extensive internet connections to needed resources such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. This is often because the business case dictates the Internet strategy. As the workplace hunkers down in their homes, the quality of access to these resources can vary widely. We see this in the insurance industries especially. Huge corporate offices have been closed, and workers are now working from home. These workers now face challenges of getting fast and reliable corporate resources access.
As more and more work and entertainment get transitioned to the home, interconnection points become more critical. An Internet Exchange (IX) inside these points becomes a valuable aggregation point for many of these ISPs. An IX can help these companies through the power of aggregation.
An IX helps to facilitate interconnection amongst its members by leveraging a one-to-many economy of scale. With data centers sometimes charging over $300 a month per cross-connect, ISP networks can run a single cross-connect to an IX and connect to all the IX members. If the IX, or a member, sells complementary services, this value increases even more.
AN IX should be an ever-evolving ecosystem to meet its members’ needs. FD-IX has worked hard to provide IX services, facilitate remote connectivity, transit services through partners, and other next-generation network services.
Over the next few years, we will see the larger aggregation points get even more significant and a push to bring content closer and closer to the end-user. This push will be accomplished through larger pipes to smaller aggregation points and caching nodes even closer to the customer. All of this will be a hybrid approach to solving the increasing demand for ever-changing end-user consumption habits.
We will also have more non-ISP members joining exchanges as they provide resources to their remote workers. Whether it be local or in the cloud, the corporate network becomes content.