Telehouse’s New York International Internet Exchange (NYIIX) has been a partner of Epsilon since 2017. Today, Epsilon enables remote peering connectivity to NYIIX for its customers from around the world.
We had the opportunity to speak with Akio Sugeno, Vice President, Internet Engineering, Operations and Business Development, Telehouse America, to learn more about NYIIX and its partnership with Epsilon.
Epsilon: Could you describe NYIIX’s journey since its founding in 1996?
Akio:Â It was not exactly a smooth road. When I was tasked to create an Internet Exchange Point (IXP) in 1995, I had no idea about the Internet or IXP.
There were no schools or books about IXPs. There were some search engines, Alta Vista or Yahoo!, but I was unable to find the information I needed. The only way to learn was to meet people. And so I started attending North American Network Operators’ Group (NANOG), which I believe was NANOG 4, and other events to meet people and learn. After intensive research, I finally founded NYIIX in 1996 at 33 Whitehall Street, New York where we had a small data centre.
Since the launch of NYIIX, my daily life was filled with challenges. Initially, I didn’t have network engineers and had to take care of NYIIX 24/7 all by myself. I had to wake up in the early morning, work on weekends and even cancel my vacation in the middle to return to New York.
At that time, the major IXPs were MAE, Sprint NAP and PAIX. I’d never imagined NYIIX can catch up with them in terms of traffic level or the number of members. I even remember debating what interface is better – Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), Ethernet (100M) or Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI) (100M). A few years later, we opened LAIIX (now NYIIX-LA) in Los Angeles.
After opening a data centre at 25 Broadway, we relocated both NYIIX and the members from 33 Whitehall Street to the new location. The main reason was 33 Whitehall Street was too small to grow and 25 Broadway has much larger space to expand. This was a tremendous project at that time, but we did it!
Since then, NYIIX gradually increased the traffic and the number of members. The fastest selling ports changed from 100M Ethernet to 1G Ethernet. Due to strong demand, we extended NYIIX beyond 25 Broadway. We started with 60 Hudson Street and then extended to 111 8th Ave and continue to grow.
