CONNECTING LIVERPOOL TO THE WORLD
Liverpool is about to become one of the most connected cites in the World. IX Liverpool is one of the reasons why.
IX Liverpool (aka the Liverpool Internet Exchange) is a local internet exchange point located within the cultural city of Liverpool within the United Kingdom. We are a collaborative, co-operative and mutual organisation, founded as a not-for-profit company and funded by our members and voluntary contributions from our local community.
We have an open joining policy for members and welcome competitive networks large and small to join and enjoy not only the local connectivity options at the exchange but to make use of the business networking opportunities, the range of public talks we put on throughout the year and the various peering workshops for members that we organise.
Thanks to the time and sheer dedication from our community, we’ve had some good successes so far: we’ve built the worlds first internet exchange in a shipping container, we’ve launched a city wide LoRaWAN (open and free internet of things network) around Liverpool and we’ve built the UK’s largest city wide community computing project that helps scientists around the world solve the world’s biggest problems in health and sustainability; by simply recycling the regions old computers and putting them to better use.
Today we’re busy building the Internet within the Liverpool City Region, making it faster, higher quality and more cost-effective and a help our local economy as we demonstrate how open Liverpool is to the Digital world.
Find out how joining an Internet exchange and peering can make your service faster, more resilient and more cost-effective.
IX Liverpool Benefits
IX Liverpool members enjoy commercial, technical, operational and social benefits. Any one of these benefits will give your organisation an advantage, especially for the low fees that we charge which really only operate on a cost recovery basis.
- Connect your corporate network to exchange traffic at a local level, resulting in lower transit costs, lower latency (for latency sensitive applications such as online gaming) to your end users and higher quality routes rather than upstream providers that rely on more complex routes, and means that the time a data packet takes to reach its destination is minimised
- Attend our regular workshops to share knowledge, experience and know-how and whereby competitors work together to help one another build a better internet
- By peering with other networks at IX Liverpool, you can reduce the route of a data packet by several thousand miles and many routers, which saves transit and download time.
- Engage in POP-Swap, as many of our members are happy to share data centre, wireless mast sites or exchange space in return for the same
- Setup private VLAN’s to another member to offer services like end to end private circuits and connectivity to local companies
- Co-operate in our Wireless Frequency Database (when using unlicensed spectrum) to keep local interference and channel use to a minimum
- Join as we come together to act as a single voice for all Communications Networks within the region as we engage with our stakeholders
- Contribute in the various Community Projects that we operate within the Liverpool Community Region
About Internet Exchanges
Local Internet exchanges help organisations and communities by improving quality, reliability and latency, and reducing dependency on other locations like London whilst allowing local users to handle traffic at a local level, giving many technological, economic and sociological benefits to society.
In the early internet years, London, Amsterdam and Frankfurt became some of the biggest exchanges in the world, and it is no coincidence that these cities enjoy some of the cheapest and most reliable internet connectivity available. Many of the most interesting services on the internet are “glued” to those cities.
In the years that followed, cites like Prague, Dublin and Warsaw built successful internet exchanges that were a catalyst for the development of the internet communities in those regions, we are working to put Liverpool on this list also.
Legal
IX Liverpool Limited is a company limited by guarantee and registered at Companies House. This is a standard form of corporation for a not-for-profit company that has members rather than shareholders. In Europe, the setup of member-owned Internet Exchanges is quite common, and came from a culture of technical co-operation between network operators. In the United States, a similar form of corporation exists in a 501(c)6 Organisation.