25 Years of SwissIX – A Quarter Century of Peering in Switzerland#

Arist Volger - SwissIX

• Why: Beyond the retrospective, this doubles as the SwissIX operational update, and the IXP industry trends it names (big flows moving to PNIs, cross-connects as a hot topic, rising expectations of free ports, IX bandwidth growth slowing) are directly relevant to DC interconnect and peering strategy anywhere.
• What: SwissIX crossed the 1 Tbps peak mark (Terabit Club member #77), serving >240 peers across 8 PoPs. Recent and planned changes: backbone upgraded to 400 Gbps (enabling retirement of the end-of-life "Groove" platform), 400G ports now available at ColoZueri, Digital Realty ZUR1, and Equinix ZH4 (second maintenance window in June), a new PoP at CERN Geneva (initially an aggregation switch, to be upgraded to a Nokia 7750-2s like the other PoPs), and secured expansion space at Equinix ZH4. Organizationally: a lean model of 5 volunteer board members, 1 FTE peering development manager, and outsourced 24x7 operations. Pricing: 100G port prices cut from HY2 2026, free upgrades for the rest of 2026, no OTCs for new ports >1G for new peers.
• How: N/A — an operational and organizational update, not a technique.
• Where applicable: Swiss-market-specific details, but the structural trends (PNI offload of large flows, free-port expectations, outsourced IXP ops) generalize to similar national IXPs (their comparison set: BCIX, BIX.hu, LU-CIX, NAMEX, VIX.at).