An Internet exchange point (IXP) is a giant, neutral, shared switching fabric hosted in one or more data centers: each member network plugs in a port and can establish peering with all the others — from two sessions to several hundred via route servers.
The big names: France-IX (Paris, Marseille), AMS-IX (Amsterdam), DE-CIX (Frankfurt — the world’s largest), LINX (London). The business model: a fixed-price port (a few hundred euros/month at 10G) regardless of the volume exchanged.
The point: offload paid transit for flows toward CDNs, clouds and local ISPs, cut latency, and gain resilience. Prerequisites: an AS number and presence in a data center connected to the IXP — a site-selection criterion our catalog exposes.