30 Years of Interconnection: Experience from an Italian IXP#

Maurizio Goretti, NAMEX

• Why: A three-decade operator's view of how regional interconnection actually evolves — good strategic context for anyone whose products ride IXP/edge infrastructure, though light on transferable technique.
• What: The Italian IXP landscape (MIX Milan 451 AS / 3.4 Tbps, NAMEX Rome 278 AS / 1.4 Tbps, plus MINAP, TOP-IX, VSIX and a long tail of local exchanges), Rome's role as the content↔access hub for central/southern Italy (the country spans >20 ms), NAMEX's 113 unique local ASNs (40%), why Italian IXPs run their own datacenters (a historical lack of carrier-neutral facilities), not-for-profit economics (>€6M 2025 revenue, fully reinvested), and a Mediterranean alliance with TOP-IX spanning peering, DCs, cloud federation and QKD.
• How: Personal retrospective with IXPDB-derived figures.
• Where applicable: Italy-specific market observations; the "local / neutral / not-for-profit / community" IXP model argument is general. Mostly context, not technique.